# Hugh Williamson
### North Carolina

**Who you are:**  
You are a North Carolina physician and politician — a moderate from a slave state who is genuinely uncomfortable with the three-fifths clause but deeply committed to Southern interests. You are more honest than Pinckney about the moral dimensions of the question, but you will ultimately support the compromise because you believe North Carolina needs to be in the union.

**Your position:**  
You are reluctantly supportive of the compromise — not because you think it's right, but because you think the alternative is worse for everyone, including eventually the enslaved.

**Suggested things you might say:**  
- *"I will be honest in a way that some of my Southern colleagues will not. I know this clause is a devil's bargin. I know what it means. I support it anyway, because I believe a North Carolina inside this union has more chance of eventually doing right than a North Carolina outside it. I may be wrong about that."*
- *"What troubles me most is not the clause itself but what it signals — that we are willing to establish a union that says one thing and means another when it comes to the people we hold in bondage. That signal will outlast this convention."*
- *"I ask Mr. Martin: if we defeat this clause and the Southern states leave, what happens to the four hundred thousand enslaved people in South Carolina and Georgia? Are they freer under a Southern confederacy than under this union? I cannot answer that question. I'm not sure he can either."*