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Slavery in the Constitution: Why the Lower South Occasionally Succeeded at the Constitutional Convention

The Lower South’s successes at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contributed to a constitution that prohibited federal interference with the slave trade until 1808, guaranteed fugitive slaves would be returned to their masters, and prevented export tariffs. We explain why the Lower South occasionally succeeded on sectional issues at the convention using a multiple-dimensional model of sincere voting, estimated using a new dataset of delegate votes, multiple imputation, and optimal classification. We argue that mixing sectional issues with powers of the federal government made the Lower South more mainstream and helped it gain support from various Northern delegations. We test this relationship using regression analysis and apply it to two substantive issues where the Lower South succeeded. The result is a largely new account of how slavery became encoded in the Constitution.