WI: Jefferson Bans the Expansion of Slavery in 1784

While Congress was drafting up the Northwest Ordinance in 1784, Thomas Jefferson proposed a plan to prohibit the westward expansion of slavery by 1800. This would have limited the boundary of American slavery to east of the Mississippi River. However, his plan was shot down by only one vote. Had a single New Jersey representative not been sick that day, he might have voted for the resolution which would have passed. If this happened, what impact would it have had on America's westward expansion, internal development, and disputes over slavery? One obvious impact is that slavery would need to be banned from the Louisiana Territory, albeit gradually, something that President Jefferson supported in a personal letter to Thomas Paine.
 
While Congress was drafting up the Northwest Ordinance in 1784, Thomas Jefferson proposed a plan to prohibit the westward expansion of slavery by 1800. This would have limited the boundary of American slavery to east of the Mississippi River. However, his plan was shot down by only one vote. Had a single New Jersey representative not been sick that day, he might have voted for the resolution which would have passed. If this happened, what impact would it have had on America's westward expansion, internal development, and disputes over slavery? One obvious impact is that slavery would need to be banned from the Louisiana Territory, albeit gradually, something that President Jefferson supported in a personal letter to Thomas Paine.

Immediate result is that no territory south of the Ohio River gets ceded to the Federal government - the areas concerned just stay part of NC and GA until they are ready for Stathood.

Come 1787 it will be impossible to include such a proviso in the Constitution, since this would prevent the South from ratifying it. It may stay on the books as a statute, but almost certainly gets repealed or declared unconstitutional.
 
Immediate result is that no territory south of the Ohio River gets ceded to the Federal government - the areas concerned just stay part of NC and GA until they are ready for Stathood.

Come 1787 it will be impossible to include such a proviso in the Constitution, since this would prevent the South from ratifying it. It may stay on the books as a statute, but almost certainly gets repealed or declared unconstitutional.

I think the North would be too stubborn to see it repealed, but like on every other issue at the Constitutional Convention we'd probably see some compromise engineered to reconcile North and South. In OTL, questions about slave personhood and equal representation were far more contentious than say the expansion of slavery, which at this time seemed to mostly concern Jefferson. (In OTL it didn't become a big issue until Tyler annexed TX). Most founding fathers, even from the South, believed slavery would eventually die out on its own and they didn't seem to expect it to move west. So instead of repealing Jefferson's Ordinance, I think the delegates would give the South something in return for no expansion. What exactly that would be is a different story.
 
I think the North would be too stubborn to see it repealed, but like on every other issue at the Constitutional Convention we'd probably see some compromise engineered to reconcile North and South. In OTL, questions about slave personhood and equal representation were far more contentious than say the expansion of slavery, which at this time seemed to mostly concern Jefferson. (In OTL it didn't become a big issue until Tyler annexed TX). Most founding fathers, even from the South, believed slavery would eventually die out on its own and they didn't seem to expect it to move west. So instead of repealing Jefferson's Ordinance, I think the delegates would give the South something in return for no expansion. What exactly that would be is a different story.

It certainly would.

In any case, though, what happens when the territories concerned attain Statehood? Once admitted, they cannot be prevented from legalising slavery, whether it was allowed before or not. That could be avoided only by a clause in the Constitution empowering Congress to forbid slavery in States rather than just in Territories, a suggestion which wouldn't stand an earthly.
 
It might not have kept slavery out of the enire Southwest, but it might have had a real effect, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee:

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"While rejecting the notion that Jefferson's free-soil clause would have had no effect, I do not mean to suggest that the clause would necessarily have prevented slavery from becoming firmly established anywhere in the Southwest. It would most likely have affected the northernmost and most mountainous portions of the Old Southwest, in which slavery never became as widely and firmly established as it did in Alabama and Mississippi. Kentucky was not part of the original Virginia cession, and the Bluegrass State never went through a territorial stage, passing instead directly out of Virginia into full membership in the Union in 1792.184 North Carolina’s cession of Tennessee did not take place until North Carolina ratified the Constitution in 1789, at which point Congress took over administering the Territory South of the Ohio, leading eventually to Tennessee's admission in 1796.185 Regarding the remainder of the Old Southwest, it is all but certain that South Carolina and Georgia never would have made their cessions had Jefferson’s provision remained in force, and even without an anti-slavery provision in place, conflicting Spanish claims, Indian wars, and complex Georgia politics involving various factions of well connected speculators with conflicting claims to Indian lands in the Yazoo delayed establishment of the Mississippi Territory (comprising the future states of Mississippi and Alabama) until 1798.186 At that time, Congress considered but rejected legislation that would have prohibited slavery in the new territory.187

"For the future states of Kentucky and Tennessee, however, approval of Jefferson’'s anti-slavery clause in 1784 would have created a period of substantial uncertainty, and any uncertainty worked against the immigration of slaveholders. Demographic history prior to the first federal census of 1790 is inexact, but even in 1790 Tennessee (The United States Territory South of the Ohio) had a black population of only 10.6% (of whom 90.4% were enslaved), similar to New York'’s (7.6%, of whom 82.1% were enslaved) or New Jersey’s (7.7 %, of whom 80.5% were enslaved), where slave owners lacked sufficient clout to prevent emancipation by political means.188 Whether slave owners would have streamed in to Tennessee in the 1790s with emancipation scheduled for 1800 is open to doubt. While Kentucky's black population for the 1790 census (conducted in the district which was then still part of Virginia) was already 17% (99.1% of whom were enslaved),189 it is questionable whether slaveowners would have risked establishing themselves in the region after 1784 with Jefferson's clause and its 1800 deadline looming over all territories to be ceded.190 This marginal uncertainty may have been determinative, and even in 1792, state constitutional sanction of slavery was only achieved after a hard fight in the convention.191 Immigrants into Kentucky between 1784 and 1792 could not have foreseen that Kentucky would never pass into territorial status, or that they would win constitutionalization of slavery at the time of statehood, even if the eventual separation of the region from Virginia was expected by the time of the Territorial Governance Act. All this is of course hypothetical, but while I cannot show that Jefferson's provision would have reduced the eventual number of slave states, neither can Finkelman show that it would not have..."

William G. Merkel, "Jefferson's Failed Anti-Slavery Proviso of 1784 and the Nascence of Free Soil Constitutionalism" http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=shlr
 
It might not have kept slavery out of the enire Southwest, but it might have had a real effect, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee:

Point taken, but, as has frequently been mentioned on this forum, Illinois came close to legalising slavery despite the NWO. Given that KY and TN are further South, and more of their immigrants will be Southern, wouldn't such measures be harder to defeat than in IL?
 
Point taken, but, as has frequently been mentioned on this forum, Illinois came close to legalising slavery despite the NWO. Given that KY and TN are further South, and more of their immigrants will be Southern, wouldn't such measures be harder to defeat than in IL?

In the case of Illinois, though, there was the peculiarity that the state--or at least most of the settled portion of it--was sandwiched between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri, and the argument of the pro-slavery forces was that many slaveholders from Kentucky were moving to Missouri instead of Illinois because of the prohibition of slavery. This map gives some idea of the "wedge" effect:


illlinois-1820.jpg
 
It might not have kept slavery out of the enire Southwest, but it might have had a real effect, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee:

In contrast, I don't think it would have impacted slavery in KY and TN. The proviso didn't seek to prohibit slavery there, and the South would certainly succeed in maintaining slavery in those territories where it already existed since the North (in 1784) didn't want to abolish slavery outside of their own respective states. Where the proviso would have an impact is in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri since now slavery can't move west of the Mississippi River. Also, Bleeding Kansas is butterflied too. TX would still be a slave territory by 1845 (when it was annexed OTL) since it was originally part of Mexico when pro-slavery Anglos settled there before 1836. However, it's status as slave land would impact it's chances of joining the Union.
 
In contrast, I don't think it would have impacted slavery in KY and TN. The proviso didn't seek to prohibit slavery there, and the South would certainly succeed in maintaining slavery in those territories where it already existed since the North (in 1784) didn't want to abolish slavery outside of their own respective states.

As Merkel notes, people who moved into the Kentucky country in the 1780's would not know that the area would become a state without going through a territorial period when slavery was prohibited. Therefore, there might be fewer slaveholders migrating there. And even in OTL there was serious emancipationist strength in the first Kentucky constitutional convention; see my post at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/kentucky-decides-against-slavery-1792.380040/
 
As Merkel notes, people who moved into the Kentucky country in the 1780's would not know that the area would become a state without going through a territorial period when slavery was prohibited. Therefore, there might be fewer slaveholders migrating there. And even in OTL there was serious emancipationist strength in the first Kentucky constitutional convention; see my post at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/kentucky-decides-against-slavery-1792.380040/

Supposing that Kentucky goes the emancipation route as a result of the 1784 POD, do you other Upper South states would do the same? Virginia came close in the 1830's, and slavery wasn't particularly strong in Maryland or Delaware. I personally think that if Jefferson succeedes it would reduce the overall power of slavery in America, but it would probably embolden slave states to make sure slavery stays in the east, including Kentucky.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
As Merkel notes, people who moved into the Kentucky country in the 1780's would not know that the area would become a state without going through a territorial period when slavery was prohibited. Therefore, there might be fewer slaveholders migrating there.
Wouldn't they be moving into Virginia? Wasn;t that land part of Virginia?
 
Wouldn't they be moving into Virginia? Wasn;t that land part of Virginia?

Not all Virginians were slaveholders, though, and there might be a higher percentage of non-slaveholders (and non-Virginians--even in OTL there were some settlers from Pennsylvania) moving into the Kentucky country if it was believed likely to become non-slave territory.

That it would eventually separate from Virginia was widely acknowledged: "Several factors contributed to the desire of the residents of Kentucky to separate from Virginia. First, traveling to the state capital was long and dangerous. Second, offensive use of local militia against Indian raids required authorization from the governor of Virginia. Last, Virginia refused to recognize the importance of trade along the Mississippi River to Kentucky's economy. It forbade trade with the Spanish colony of New Orleans, which controlled the mouth of the Mississippi, but this was important to Kentucky communities.[67]

The magnitude of these problems increased with the rapid growth of population in Kentucky, leading Colonel Benjamin Logan to call a constitutional convention in Danville in 1784. Over the next several years, nine more conventions were held. During one, General James Wilkinson proposed secession from both Virginia and the United States to become a ward of Spain, but the idea was defeated..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Kentucky
 
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