ive political representation to wealth, or to
anything but persons. We have become thoroughly democratic, but our
great-grandfathers had not. To them it seemed quite essential that
wealth should be represented as well as persons; but they got over the
main difficulty easily, because under the economic conditions of that
time population could serve roughly as an index to wealth, and it was
much easier to count noses than to assess the value of farms and stock.

[Sidenote: Were slaves to be reckoned as persons or as chattels?]

But now there was in all the southern states, and in most of the
northern, a peculiar species of collective existence, which might be
described either as wealth or as population. As human beings the slaves
might be described as population, but in the eye of the law they were
chattels. In the northern states slavery was rapidly disappearing, and
the property in negroes was so small as to be hardly worth considering;
while south of Mason and Dixon's line this peculiar kind of property was
the chief wealth of the states. But clearly, in apportioning
representation, in sharing political power in the federal assembly, the
same rule should have been applied impartially to all the states. At
this point, Pierce Butler and Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina
insisted that slaves were part of the population, and as such must be
counted in ascertaining the basis of representation. A fierce and
complicated dispute ensued. The South Carolina proposal suggested a
uniform rule, but it was one that would scarcely alter the political
weight of the north, while it would vastly increase the weight of the
south; and it would increase it most in just the quarter where slavery
was most deeply rooted. The power of South Carolina, as a member of the
Union, would be doubled by such a measure. Hence the northern delegates
maintained that slaves, as chattels, ought no more to be reckoned as
part of the population than houses or ships. "Has a man in Virginia,"
exclaimed Paterson, "a number of votes in proportion to the number of
his slaves? And if negroes are not represented in the states to which
they belong, why should they be represented in the general
government?... If a meeting of the people were to take place in a slave
state, would the slaves vote? They would not. Why then should they be
represented in a federal government?" "I can never agree," said
Gouverneur Morris, "to give such encouragement to the slave-trade a