At the time of the formation of the Constitution of the United States, there was not a single production, common to all the States, of sufficient importance to become an article of general exportation. Indeed, there were no commodities produced for exportation by so many of the States, that a tax or duty imposed upon them on leaving the country would operate with anything like equality even in different sections of the Union. In fact, from the extreme northern to the extreme southern boundary of the Union, the exports were so various, both in kind and amount, that a tax imposed on an article the produce of the South could not be balanced by a tax imposed upon an article produced or manufactured at the North. How, for example, could the burden of an export duty on the tobacco of Virginia, or the rice or indigo of South Carolina, be equalized by a similar duty on the lumber or fish or flour of other States? Possibly, after long experience and the accumulation of the necessary statistics, an approach towards an equality of such burdens might have been made; but it could never have become more than an unsatisfactory approximation; and while the effect of such a tax at one end of the Union on the demand for the commodity subjected to it might be estimated,--because the opportunity for other nations to supply themselves elsewhere might be so precise as to be easily measured,--its effect at the other end of the Union, on another commodity, might be wholly uncertain, because the demand from abroad might be influenced by new sources of supply, or might from accidental causes continue to be nearly the same as before. However theoretically correct it might have been, therefore, to confer on the general government the same authority to tax exports as to impose duties on imported commodities,--and the argument for it drawn from the necessities for revenue and protection of manufactures was exceedingly strong,--the actual situation of the country made it quite impracticable to obtain the consent of some of the States to a full and complete revenue power. Several of the most important persons in the Convention were strongly in favor of it. Washington, Madison, Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, and Dickinson are known to have held the opinion, that the government would be incomplete, without a power to tax exports as well as imports. But the decided stand taken by South Carolina, whose exports for a single year were said by General Pinckney to have amounted to £600,000, the fruit of the labor of her slaves, probably led the committee of detail to insert in their report of a draft of the Constitution a distinct prohibition against laying any tax or duty on articles exported from any State.