Title: "Our Pro-Slavery Constitution"

Class: Political Science 312

 

With the Constitution being written over one thousand years ago, the intentions of the framers has been long debated. While several issues today question specific amendments and interpretations found in the Constitution, one of the most important questions involves the defense of a highly contested topic in American history – slavery. Scholars have analyzed the important document that structures our society and government today, and are concerned that perhaps our beloved Constitution protected the enslavement of people since its creation up until the Civil War. I find, without a doubt, that the practice of slavery was protected by the Constitution as evidenced by explicit, textual support within the clauses of the document, as well as several compromises and acts that were passed during the Civil War era. I argue that the Constitution is a pro-slavery document and that while the framers acknowledged that slavery might not have been morally right, they constructed a document that made slavery legal and allowed for slaves to be held as property to their owners.

 

During the 1700s and early 1800s, slavery was a powerful economic institution that was found almost everywhere in the United States’ colonies. Slavery was firmly established with statutes and codes in various colonies that allowed the regulation of slaves and all conduct involving slaves and even free blacks. The people during this period of time were concerned with both geographical and political debates between pro- and anti-slavery states. Slavery was the key to economic and agricultural prosperity in the South, and Southerners argued that their society would not work without it. At the Constitutional Convention, these Southern slaveholders demanded that they would not agree to a constitution that did not protect their economy and their most basic property rights. The Northern regions, however, realized that the institution was not profitable enough, and began to insist that slavery was morally wrong and should be abolished. Five Northern colonies eventually banned slavery, but the practice expanded throughout the South, and the issue continued to divide the country. Without a final solution in sight for the near future, several compromises and acts were made to ameliorate some of the tensions, while still protecting the institution, brought on by this contentious issue. Support for the new Constitution rested on the balance of these sectional interests, further supporting the fact that it was a pro-slavery document.

 

Delegates opposed to slavery generally wished to count only the free inhabitants of each state, but delegates who supported slavery generally wanted to count slaves in their actual numbers. Since slaves could not vote, slaveholders would have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College. The three-fifths Compromise was included in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution. “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons” (United States Constitution). Some people make the argument that this compromise undermines the “one person, one vote” idea instilled in the Constitution. However, if they had counted slaves as one person this would have increased the number of people in the South so they would have had more congressional power. Since their delegates were also their owners, and were not representing their interests, counting them as a whole person would have increased their subordination, as well as further protecting slavery under the Constitution.

 

Because of the contentious issues that surrounded the wording of the Constitution, the framers assigned a Committee of Detail Report whose duty was to lie out the wording and meaning of the different articles so that there were certain loopholes to make both sides more willing to accept it. The Constitution was clearly a slaveholder’s document in the sense that in Article VII, Section 1, Congress was forbidden forever from prohibiting the slave trade, and any incentive through taxation was also prohibited. In the final version of the Constitution, the document permits Congress to eliminate the slave trade by 1808 and permits Congress to discourage the trade by taxation; however, it did not require Congress to ban the trade after that date. “The Migration or Importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such importation” (Constitution Article I, Section 9). Some scholars argue today that there was indeed an anti-slavery approach in the Constitution. The counterargument that they present is that the parts of the Constitution that upheld slavery were for the states that already existed. They argue that Congress was allowed to ban slavery for new territories that were applying for statehood, and because of this fact, the Constitution actually demanded anti-slavery. I find, however, that the framers of the Constitution were not trying to prohibit slavery, but were actually trying to find tricky ways to make it legal to possess slaves without offending the North. For example, Article I, Section 8 empowered Congress to “suppress Insurrections” including slave rebellions. Besides specific clauses of the Constitution, the structure of the entire document ensured against the freeing of slaves by the federal government.

 

At the Constitutional Convention, several delegates from both the North and the South argued on whether the Constitution should continue to include slavery or even mention the terms “blacks,” “Negroes,” and “slaves.” The final language was designed to make the Constitution more palatable to the North, but not taking away slavery from the South. Many argued that 1808 was too compromising and almost none of the slaveholders at the Convention felt any great shame over their human property. Others argued that slavery “would bring the judgment of heaven on a Country,” and was “inadmissible on every principle of honor and safety” and would not agree to the clause as it stood. Further compromises were made in order to avoid dividing the country by completely accepting slavery, or by completely abolishing it.

 

With the slave trade no longer protected by the Constitution in 1808, by 1820, Congress debated over how to divide the newly acquired territories into slave and free states. The next of these compromises was the unconstitutional Missouri Compromise or the Compromise of 1820. It was an agreement between the pro- and anti-slavery territories on the regulation of slavery in the Western territories. The Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery above the 36°30° line, but continued to allow slave states to enter the Union (Basic Overview of the Missouri Compromise). Soon after that, Henry Clay presented the Compromise of 1850 that allowed slavery to be left off the table, and the issue was to be decided when the territories applied for statehood. Additionally, the slave trade was to be abolished in the District of Columbia, although slavery was still permitted in the nation’s capitol.

 

The Fugitive Slave Act was also passed during this time and both Northern and Southern citizens were required to aid in the recovery of fugitive slaves. These fugitives had no right to a jury trial and the act made the process for filing a claim against fugitive slaves easier for slave owners. The new law that was protected under the Constitution was devastating for anti-slavery advocates and for black people themselves. Even free blacks were captured and sent to the South and were completely defenseless with no legal rights. The Fugitive Slave Act made the federal government responsible for apprehending fugitive slaves in the North and sending them back to the South. Even though the slave trade was technically ended in 1808 and no longer protected by the Constitution, compromises and acts, especially the Fugitive Slave Act, allowed the spread of slavery under the eye of the federal government and protection of the pro-slavery document.

 

In 1857, in response to the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott v. Sandford case made more ripples in the debate on slavery and its place in the Constitution. Often considered one of the worst decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court, Chief Justice Taney stirred the debate and held that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories because slaves were personal property and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution protects property owners against deprivation of their property without due process of law. Contrary to the practice of many free states during this time, the ruling declared that African Americans were not citizens and had no standing to sue in court. The rationale of the Supreme Court implied that people of African descent, both enslaved and free, were not protected by the Constitution and were not U.S. citizens (Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857 case). Up until the passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, both rulings were upheld as supreme law by the highest court in the land, further protecting slavery under our federal government.

 

Even before these compromises were made to further instill slavery in the Union and under the Constitutional law, the framers drafted a document that protected a system where people could be held as property under another person and were denied their most basic rights. Much like when our ancestors rebelled from under British monarchial control because of their unfair treatment and unfair representation, we created a society and government under one document that upheld those same atrocious values. William Lloyd Garrison wrote “On the Constitution and the Union,” and claimed that because of the compact that we made with the document, it allowed the people of this time to “plunder, persecute, and destroy two millions of slaves” (Paragraph 2). He explains that it was cowardly for the framers to leave out the question of slavery because of the fear of destroying the Union. It would have been worth the price to not preserve the Union if it meant saving “the souls of millions of [our] people.” While the framers were not willing to take the moral high ground, they instead concerned themselves with making a pro-slavery document that held together an already fragile Union based on the enslavement of innocent people. Today, the Constitution does not explicitly make the practice of property in a person legal, but it does not necessarily abolish the previous amendments, clauses, or intentions that allowed slavery to perpetuate our nation for hundreds of years.