ing and fishing). Even the economy of Rhode Island, established by Roger Williams as "an experiment in democracy and soul liberty," was by the middle of the eighteenth century dominated by slave-owning planters at Newport.
Although the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself moved ever farther southward after the Revolutionary War, the institution was ingrained into the very fabric of the constitution. The Great Compromise put in the Constitution (Article I, Section 2) that slaves were to be considered three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and congressional representation. By the time of the Revolutionary War -- and certainly by the time of the Constitutional Convention -- a racist component had entered the picture of slavery. If, as the myth has it, the cotton gin made slavery economically viable, it also enabled the idea of enslavement to be linked strongly to blacks.
The three-fifths compromise on slavery showed that most of the people involved in the constitutional convention looked forward to the passing of slavery within a generation. But the momentum was all on the side of the economic benefits that slave holders were experiencing. The three-fifths agreement was "momentous" because it "gave Constitutional sanction to the fact that the United States was composed of some persons who were "free" and others who were not." Robinson continues:
[I]t established the principle, new in republican theory, that a man who lived among slaves had a greater share in the electing of representatives than the man wh
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