Slavery and the Constitution

With our current President and the talk of race and with Pook's comment I thought we should look at the issues of slavery and what the Constitution really says. No commentary, let's just deal with facts.

In 1776 the U.S. was one of hundreds of nations that had slaves. At that time there were approx. a half million slaves mostly in 4 southern states. The practice of slavery was brought to the US from Britain where it had been practiced for centuries. It was a way of life. That doesn't make it right it's just the way it was. Many of our founding fathers including John Adams, Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton spoke out against the practice. Many others owned slaves but as seen in their writings were conflicted about the practice.

In 1774 Thomas Jefferson in his draft to the First Continental Congress wrote "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state." By the time of the U.S. Constitution, every state (except Georgia) had at least denounced or suspended the importation of slaves.

However, like politics today there are opposing sides and when it came time for the final draft of the Constitution compromises were made. The southern states wanted the slaves counted as "whole" persons so they could keep their House seats (up to 40% of the population in many states were slaves). The northern states wanted to penalize the slave practice by not counting them and thus make the practice less attractive. The 3/5's of a person was the compromise. Compromise #2 was that after 1808 no more slaves could be brought in. This was the compromise between abolishing it then to never ending it.

The term slave and slavery were kept out of the Constitution and as Madison's notes state the delegates "thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men".

There is no doubt slavery was indeed the imperfection that marred the American founding. Those who founded this nation chose to make practical compromises for the sake of establishing in principle a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In 1837 John Quincy Adams said "Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence slavery, in common with every mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth."

So the slavery compromises included in the Constitution can be understood to be compromises needed to establish a new nation rather than a surrender of principle. But in the end it took a bloody civil war to bring about the original intention of the Constitution by many of it's founders. How you view this country will ultimately color how you view this issue of slavery. Was slavery a US institution established and practiced by a majority meant to dehumanize another race for economic gain or was it a long held world practice that came to our land with deep roots that took the lives of many men to overturn? Reading many of our founders notes I choose to believe the latter. Slavery was never meant to be the law of this land.