Southern extortion threats secured pro-slavery provisions in the Constitution.

Evidence

When, for example, Gouverneur Morris, who represented Pennsylvania, blasted the Atlantic slave trade as “cruel” and “in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity,” John Rutledge of South Carolina issued an extortionist warning about any attempt to curtail it: “If the Convention thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will ever agree to the plan [for a Constitution] unless their right to import slaves [from Africa] be untouched, the expectation is vain.” Those threats worked to secure twenty additional years of the Atlantic slave trade, the Three-fifths Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. And they left a lasting impression on James Madison about how fragile the tendons were that bound the United States of America together. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 785

Categorization

• XREF: The extortion mechanism directly instantiates how slavery became foundational (design) rather than peripheral to the national compact — core to the reader’s reframing case study. — connects to: Southern delegates argued enslaved people were property, not taxable free persons. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 293