Constitutional convention Quote by James Madison

“The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen…

— Howard Zinn

The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its…

— James Madison

But the Constitution was made not only for southern and northern states, but for states neither northern nor southern, namely, the western states, their…

— William H. Seward

..if the Northern states refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves,…

— Daniel Webster

It was one of the compromises of the Constitution that the slave property in the Southern States should be recognized as property throughout the…

— Jefferson Davis

“the Southern States rebelled against the usurpation of their rights under the Constitution as sovereign states. It’s critical to remember that, until that time,…

— Joseph Befumo

The systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question, with the actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion…

— Isham G. Harris

“The Confederate States of America in 1861 was legally an independent government. The Southern states seceded by popular conventions of the people of each…

— Brion T. McClanahan

It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence…

— William H. Seward

It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do…

— Gerrit Smith

Slavery existed before the formation of this Union. It derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed without the confederation.…

— Jefferson Davis

The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long…

— Benjamin Cardozo