No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Book 18)

by Sean Wilentz

In fact, the framers’ choice of words was a substantive matter, not a cosmetic one. The convention’s key arguments over how to describe slaves and slavery in the Constitution had little or nothing to do with the prudent suppression of distasteful language. They had to do with ensuring that the Constitution contained nothing that could be construed as acknowledging and thereby endorsing property in man.