In its opening months, the First Congress had an ambitious agenda. It established executive departments, the judiciary, and a federal postal system. It crafted the Bill of Rights, debated Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit, and ratified its first Indian treaty. Tackling slavery was nowhere on its agenda. Congressmen assumed that key North-South compromises embedded in the Constitution had resolved the issue. But they were wrong: An angry debate over slavery burst forth in early 1790.

In mid-February, citizens of Pennsylvania and New York petitioned Congress to “exercise justice and mercy” and to end the “trafficking in the persons of fellow-men”—that is, the slave trade. The petitioners were Quakers, members of a religion with a long-standing moral objection to slavery. The pragmatic James Madison urged the representatives to refer the petitions to a congressional committee, thus keeping them out of public view. Representatives from South Carolina and Georgia instead urged immediate dismissal, citing the Constitution’s ban on interference with the slave trade before 1808. Reaching no agreement, the Congress postponed discussion for a day.

But the next day brought another petition, not coincidentally. Drawn up by a largely Quaker group called the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, it asked Congress “to discourage every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men” and to “countenance the restoration of liberty” to slaves. The petition quoted the Constitution to prove the government’s duty to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” for all. That Benjamin Franklin’s signature topped the list of petitioners gave it significant political clout.

This second petition was not just about the Atlantic slave trade, which was indeed protected for twenty years by the Constitution. It called for Congress to legislate on the domestic buying and selling of slaves, about which the Constitution was silent. Further, restoring liberty to slaves required an emancipation law, again something not barred by the Constitution. No method was specified “for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people,” but the petitioners expressed confidence in a merciful Congress.

The petitions touched off an explosive debate in the House. Several northern representatives tried to use them to reopen the contentious issue; representatives from the deep South were adamantly opposed. A rare moment of contemptuous humor surfaced when a South Carolina member asserted that during ratification, “We took each other, with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better, for worse; the Northern States adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their Quakers.” No other levity was to be heard. Southerners cited biblical justifications for slavery, argued that slavery civilized slaves, predicted economic collapse if slavery ended, and called the petitioners fanatics. Madison finally got his way: The petitions were referred to a committee, amid mounting concern that newspaper coverage of the debate would create rebelliousness among slaves.

A month later, that committee’s report defined a middle road in clarifying the powers of Congress over slavery. As expected, the report affirmed that Congress could not end the slave trade before 1808, but it also concluded that Congress could neither force emancipation nor deny it. And while the report held that Congress had no authority to regulate slave treatment, it urged southern legislatures to pass humanitarian laws regulating the provision of food and housing and the protection of slave women and families. Southern representatives strongly objected to this third pronouncement, touching off yet another bitter public debate in Congress.

In the end, a shorter report was hammered out in debate as the formal reply to the petitioners, in which the key provision read: “The Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the States; it remaining with the several States alone to provide any regulation therein, which humanity and true policy may require.” The final vote on this amended report was a squeaker, with 29 ayes to 25 nays.

The Quaker groups conceded and ceased filing petitions, but a discouraged Benjamin Franklin made one last attempt to shape public opinion by writing a satirical essay for a Philadelphia newspaper. In it, the elder statesman ridiculed the proslavery speeches by transposing their exact arguments into a bogus document by a purported North African Muslim leader explaining why his country’s fifty thousand Christian slaves were better off enslaved than free. It was vintage Franklin—funny, smart, and cutting. It was also Franklin’s final public pronouncement; he died suddenly three weeks later, at the age of eighty-four. The congressional report launched against his 1790 petition stood for more than four decades as the silencing mechanism against any attempt at the federal level to disrupt slavery.

Questions for Consideration

Connect to the Big Idea

What powers did Congress have over the institution of slavery, according to the Constitution?