the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves.” Morris’s language harkened back to the colonial ideal that the Middle Colonies, Pennsylvania in particular, had always been “the best poor man’s country.” There, “noble cultivation” and hard work could make everyone successful, in stark contrast to the South, where slavery had corrupted whites and divorced them from productive labor.73
Though Morris acknowledged, at least tacitly, the Mid-Atlantic’s ties to slavery, he made sure to highlight that northern slavery was not as harsh as the southern institution. He claimed that when crossing into “New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys and entering Pennsylvania every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed south and every step you take through the great region of slaves” extenuates the dissimilarities between North and South. Morris believed that southern slavery was “so nefarious a practice” that it could never be equivalent with the institution in the North.74
Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman likewise argued that slavery in the North was intrinsically different by highlighting that abolition had commenced and “that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it.” Fellow Connecticut delegate Oliver Elsworth latched onto the idea of “good sense” and argued that “slavery in time will not be a speck in our country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it and the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts.” Elsworth also believed that free labor would expand and replace slavery, further strengthening the North’s economic strength and separating it from the South’s dependence on slave labor.75
Even as northerners tried to separate themselves from southerners, both shared a common belief in black inferiority. New Jersey’s William Paterson offered that he “could regard negro slaves in no light but as property. They are no free agents, have no personal liberty.” Likewise, Morris contended that “the people of Pennsylvania would revolt at the idea of being put on a footing with slaves.” These arguments, while underscoring the hypocrisy of making slaves both persons and property during the three-fifths compromise debate, represented the widespread view that blacks were not equal to whites.76
The combination of sectional differences in the convention and abolition’s success in New England and Pennsylvania convinced many Jersey abolitionists that slavery’s days in New Jersey were numbered. Joseph Bloomfield linked abolition to economic opportunity in an attempt to persuade New Jerseyans that slave labor actually hurt the economy. He claimed that New Englanders “by their enlightened” abolition policy and their employment of “the labor of freeman instead of slaves are daily obtaining advantages over the southern states.” The South, in their maintenance of the “injustice and immobility of their citizens in the unnatural and cruel treatment of their fellow men,” prevents them from an adequate “competition” with “the freeman.”77
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