Slavery and the Constitution

Was the original Constitution a “pro-slavery” document? Did it do “more to feed the serpent than to crush it?” Was it Frederick Douglass’s “Glorious Liberty Document?” By accommodating slavery did it eventually crush its head through permanent union with economically dynamic free states and Civil War? Could slavery have been abolished at the founding? When would abolition have occurred if union had never been created? Three states would not join a union forbidding the slave trade. Many abhorred it. A slaveholder himself, Jefferson’s draft Declaration charged the King with its introduction. Slavery was a five hundred pound gorilla the Founders accommodated, constructing a “house divided,” in the hope it would strategically enable independence and endure until slavery withered. But twenty additional years of the trade and invention of the cotton gin delayed that hope for more than 500,000 and their offspring. By 1812 the accommodation secured independence for a perpetual union. But the promise of the Declaration’s preamble remained unfulfilled until Lincoln rediscovered its relationship to the Constitution. At the founding, “Join or Die” meant kicking the can down the road regarding “other persons.”

Neither the Constitution nor the Articles of Confederation explicitly sanction or forbid slavery. “Slave” does not appear in either text. By stark contrast, the permanent Constitution of the Confederacy is rife with protection of the ownership of human beings and explicitly applies the word “slave” to them. It required its member states to mutually recognize ownership rights of slave owners and explicitly required admitted states to sanction slavery. This was a pro-slavery document. It was clearly not just about “states’ rights.”

...

... middle of paper ...

...al treatment of freed blacks (and Federalist 54). In what is properly dictum, it declared for only the second time that a law - the Missouri Compromise – was unconstitutional. Lincoln recognized the unacceptable implications if this was binding – slaveholders could turn free states into slave states. (Interestingly, if Scott had brought his case earlier, state courts probably would have ruled in his favor.) While Chief Justice Taney may have hoped to settle the issue of slavery, he instead lit a fuse igniting the Civil War, which is part of the history of implementation.

Unlike its Confederate counterpart, the Constitution is not a pro-slavery document. But it is only a “Glorious Liberty Document,” when properly informed by the preamble to the Declaration and implemented to eventually draw the serpent into permanent union before crushing its head in a Civil War.