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Was Slavery at the Heart of the U.S. Constitution?

by Michael Strickland

Constitutional interpretation claims to be faithful to neutral legal principles. However, a definitive original meaning is nonetheless saddled by contemporary politics and views of morality.

“David Waldstreicher’s intriguing book brilliantly shows the founding fathers’ republican constitution to be, in important part, central to their many evasions of slavery’s antirepublican nature.” —William W. Freehling Black History month and Martin Luther King celebrations will soon be sprouting up, once again, around the country. With race already at the forefront of the dialogue with heated debates about profiling and police brutality, it is a good time to revisit some vital discussions about how our nation took shape. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet, of its eighty-four clauses, six were directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clauses had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification. Some scholars, such as Waldstreicher, place slavery slavery’s place at the heart of the U.S. Constitution.

This “peculiar institution” was not a moral blind spot for America’s otherwise enlightened framers, nor was it the expression of a mere economic interest. Slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery.  

By tracing slavery from before the revolution, through the Constitution’s framing, and into the public debate that followed, Waldstreicher rigorously shows that slavery was not only actively discussed behind the closed and locked doors of the Constitutional Convention, but that it was also deftly woven into the Constitution itself. For one thing, slavery was central to the American economy, and since the document set the stage for a national economy, the Constitution could not avoid having implications for slavery. Even more, since the government defined sovereignty over individuals, as well as property in them, discussion of sovereignty led directly to debate over slavery’s place in the new republic.

Finding meaning in silences that have long been ignored, Slavery’s Constitution is a vital and sorely needed contribution to the conversation about the origins, impact, and meaning of our nation’s founding document.While the compromise on representation was a critical turning point at the Constitutional Convention, the issue of slavery was just as important. By the 1830s, slaveowners told opponents of slavery that the Constitution protected slavery, representatives from the slave states would never have signed it otherwise, and everyone at the Constitutional Convention knew it. The discussion of the international slave trade at that convention underscores this reality.

Some historians maintain that Southerners at the convention never really contemplated a separate nation. Indeed, the three South Carolina delegates who voice such threats in this extract supported a strong national government. Nevertheless, the belief that their threats were serious had become dogma by the 1850s. Thus the debate began a pattern of threats by slaveowners that eventually resulted in secession.


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