The Slaveholding Republic Quotes

“Most striking, however, was the position taken in the 1840s by William Lloyd Garrison and his wing of the abolitionist movement. The Garrisonians had come to agree completely with the southern view of the Constitution as a proslavery document.5°”
― Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery

“During observance of the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall made a public attack upon the celebration in which he disparaged the achievements of the Constitutional Convention and said that he did not "find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound." According to Marshall, the original Constitution was defective because it excluded women and Negroes from the right of suffrage, and, most egregiously, it perpetuated and reinforced the institution of slavery. The men of 1787 actually contributed little, he maintained, to the modern American constitutional system, with its "respect for individual freedoms and human rights."sl”
― Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery

“The framers of the Constitution, dealing with slavery as an incidental but troublesome circumstance, ended by extending it a kind of shamefaced recognition that included a measure of protection, but they contributed little to defining its national status.”
― Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery

“By the time of the Revolution there was in each colony an accumulated body of slave law that did not so much establish slavery as acknowledge its presence, sanction it, and regulate its conduct.”
― Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery