Continuing his systematic survey in Federalist No. 42 of the powers to be granted to the new government by the Constitution, James Madison quickly runs through several that are readily justifiable as essential for any system that is truly to govern a nation, even a nation of states. The power to regulate foreign commerce, for instance, and to conduct our foreign affairs more generally? “If we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations.” And there is quite a list of powers that “provide for the harmony and proper intercourse among the states,” including the power over internal commerce among the states, as well as over currency, weights and measures, bankruptcy laws, the naturalization of aliens, and the post office, among other matters.
But one passage in this essay stands out, knowing as we do that our anonymous Publius is, on this occasion, the Virginian James Madison, who owned slaves all his life. Remarking on the clause of Article I, section 9 that restrains for twenty years the power of Congress to prohibit the slave trade, Madison says “it is not difficult to account either for the restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed.” Neither of these “not difficult” matters does Madison ever explain. The first—the restriction on this power of the government—can be explained by the insistence of the southern states that the opponents of the slave trade make a concession to them. But this brute compromise is apparently too distasteful for Madison to discuss. The second—the reference to the manner of expression the clause employs—is Madison’s way of alluding to the fact that the clause never uses the word “slave” or “slavery,” but speaks more obliquely. This is apparently too obvious for Madison to mention, but it expresses, in the Constitution’s own reticence, the same distaste.
One thing is not oblique at all. Madison detests slavery. He puts the best anti-slavery face on this clause, in phrases that a happy slaveowner could not have used merely to appease a New York readership:
“It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate for ever within these states, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy . . . Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them, of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!”
This is James Madison, sixteen months before the lately rediscovered William Wilberforce gave his first speech in the British House of Commons denouncing the slave trade. This is James Madison, slaveowner at the time and for the next 48 years. History does not always have tidy compartmentalizations of simon-pure heroes and villains. We’ll have another look at Madison on the slavery question when we come to Federalist No. 54.
(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)