James Madison v. Alexander Hamilton

[Torie]

Hamilton by a country mile, and one reason, little known, is Madison's role in keeping slavery legal in the US at the one moment when it might have been abolished.

[Torie]

Hamilton by a country mile, and one reason, little known, is Madison's role in keeping slavery legal in the US at the one moment when it might have been abolished.

According to that article, though, it's not clear anything would have come of this, besides the southern states splitting off from the Union (and thus preserving slavery, in practice, for several more decades than in original history). This is the tricky thing about the politics of slavery in the Early Republic: yes, the Northern states had the votes to abolish slavery on paper, but prior to 1850 they lacked the power to impose abolition by the bayonet, which was the only way it was ever going to happen. If your first priority is to expunge the federal government of culpability, then this isn't an issue, but if you're motivated by a desire to actually end slavery, it makes things considerably more complicated.

Virginia and NC would probably not have split off, along with Maryland and Delaware, and that might have dissuaded Georgia and SC going down that road. That is the key point. At the time, slavery was not so deeply ingrained into the Southern economy prior to the cotton gin, and most of the deep south had not been taken from the Native Americans yet, to make it "safe" for slavery.