Above all else—union....................

 

        But that would not be the end of the matter.  If Congress did not end this "slave business," the head of the select committee quietly communicated to his antislavery colleagues, then the entire South might "rise up in a flame."  No one was willing to take this chance.  While Madison himself thought the proslavery arguments "shamefully indecent," he cherished the union even more.  And as Madison went, so went the moderates.  As the moderates went, so went Congress. After several days of debate, on March 23, the majority that had favored Franklin's petition disintegrated, and an exhausted House voted 29-25 to accept a heavily amended report that basically buried the matter.  More starkly, it said in effect that slavery in the South would be out of bounds of congressional discussion—forever.   The founding generation, always obsessed with its capacity to set precedents, had inadvertently set a strong precedent on the very matter they hoped to avoid.  Without intending it, Congress had determined that the new republic should—indeed it would—sanction, even underwrite, bondage.  The stage was thus set for a collision one day between the integrity of republican government and the right to hold, sell, and buy men, women, and children as though they were cattle.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800