Slavery's Constitution Quotes

“Slavery was “inconsistent with the genius of republicanism,” Martin insisted. “When our own liberties were at stake, we warmly felt for the common rights of man.” There was no logical reason why a government bound to protect the states against invasions and insurrections could not regulate the migration of slaves. Martin remained a states’ righter, but he still could not comprehend why the government could not be strong in interstate matters like slavery while leaving the states to themselves on domestic issues. The inconsistency suggested that within the structure of the Constitution, crucial liberties had been sacrificed, and not for the common good.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Will it not be said, that the greatest Sticklers for Liberty, are its worst Enemies?” Worst of all, in Hughes’s mind, was Benjamin Franklin, head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, for helping “frame a Constitution which evidently has a Tendency not only to enslave all those whom it ought to protect; but avowedly encourages” the enslavement of others. As soon as it was adopted, politicians like Franklin would say it was “called for by the people,” Hughes observed, though really it was nothing but a specious deal between North and South: “If you will permit us to import Africans as Slaves, we will consent that you may export Americans, as soldiers.” The supremacy and treaty clauses meant that Americans, like Hessians during the war, could be “detached and transported to the West or East-indies.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“It had been said, “It is not we doing it.” To the contrary, insisted these quintessential provincials, “We are the nation” who will have to defend slaveholders when “Africans rise up” and a foreign power intervenes on their side. Why wasn’t the prohibition of the slave trade by the Continental Congress in 1774 an ironclad precedent? “Can we suppose what was morally evil in the year 1774, has become in the year 1788, morally good?” Perhaps tired of reading about people like themselves as living proof of the need for better leadership, the dissenters turned their antifederalist antislavery into a blast against the founders themselves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Why wasn’t the prohibition of the slave trade by the Continental Congress in 1774 an ironclad precedent? “Can we suppose what was morally evil in the year 1774, has become in the year 1788, morally good?” Perhaps tired of reading about people like themselves as living proof of the need for better leadership, the dissenters turned their antifederalist antislavery into a blast against the founders themselves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“States with slaves had more votes in the Congress than states without them, making the three-fifths clause reason enough to reject the document.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Only greed, and lust for power, could explain how “the professed enemies of negro and every other species of slavery, should themselves join in the adoption of a constitution whose very basis is despotism and slavery.”15”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“To give more power to Southerners was to hand the federal government over to the least egalitarian people in the United States.13”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The pass given the slave trade added insult to the injury, creating a political incentive to enslave more Africans.12”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The Constitution guaranteed a republican form of government to the states—but didn’t its protections for slavery undermine republican government as well? The security for the slave trade in Article I, Section 9, he wrote, went against what other states had already done to purify themselves of slavery’s corruption, and “is especially scandalous and inconsistant in a people, who have asserted their own liberty by the sword, and which dangerously enfeebles the districts, wherein the laborers are bondsmen. The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.” The Constitution partook of propaganda. The corollary: don’t trust men in the highest stations.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“At the same time—and this is ultimately what makes the document proslavery—the Constitution enacted mechanisms that empowered slaveholders politically, which would prevent the national government from becoming an immediate or likely impediment to the institution.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The founders’ Constitution avoided theorizing African slavery as right or wrong, as an Old World holdover or a New World innovation, as a pillar of the Republic or an anachronism headed for the dustbin of history, as something that could be legislated or something that could not, because they could not agree on these things. The text they enshrined allowed for different possible results: slavery’s continuance, spread, or eventual end.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“What implications did this understanding of process have for the place of slavery in the ratification struggle? On the one hand, the framers had artfully hidden the evidence of compromise and even the subject itself in silence and ambiguity. A quick ratification would, in effect, ratify the decision not to unpack the ambiguities or spell out the compromises.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The presumption that the people themselves should contemplate, discuss, and ratify the Constitution through their representatives in convention presupposed the active use of reason and criticism. To rush the process of ratification under presumption of a crisis, as Federalists did successfully in Pennsylvania and Delaware, suggested ulterior motives. The secrecy that had allowed for frank debate and creative deals in convention could be—and quickly was—reinterpreted as conspiratorial and undemocratic.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“That President Washington decided that slavery was wrong yet felt bound by the Constitution to do nothing about it captures the main effects that the Constitution had on slavery and American politics. The framers’ Constitution disapproved of slavery by implication but made it harder to do much about it nationally.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity.”52”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Even to contemplate, much less codify, this much governance, and that much economic regulation, was itself risky after a revolution against imperial governance and regulation. In the end, the founders used slavery to limit government while allowing slaves to be governed both locally and nationally. In fewer, smaller ways, slavery was itself limited. More decisively, slavery was alternately winked at and silenced as a subject of political debate and adjudication. In the process, it was not so much forgotten as contained.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Instead, the founders’ creative energies had turned disagreement, even contradiction, regarding slavery into a structure to manage doubts and conflicts about nationhood as well as slavery itself. The business of slavery had not been left unfinished so much as it had been leveraged.51”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The compromises of 1787 welded together two dimensions of the politics of slavery: slavery as a form of governance over certain people, and slavery as an economic institution.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“By the end of August the federal constitutional consensus had emerged clearly enough for all the delegates to see. Slavery would be protected by several interlocking provisions—but not mentioned explicitly.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The Committee on Detail went about its work boldly, especially where it concerned the slavery question. Its makeup made a key difference. The South Carolinian John Rutledge joined Edmund Randolph, James Wilson, and two New Englanders, Nathaniel Gorham and Oliver Ellsworth, who had participated in discussions about sectional compromise. Its report has been called a “monument to Southern craft and gall,” even a hijacking of the Constitution for proslavery purposes.34”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“However subtle or overt, the compromise of 1787 solidified the practice of deal making between increasingly self-aware sections defined by slavery.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Butler reiterated the Deep South line, minus the Virginian apologetics: “The security the South[er]n States want is that their negroes, may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“John Dickinson asked, “What will be said of this new principle of founding a Right to govern Freemen on a power derived from Slaves . .”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“In a narrow sense, slavery was “not on the agenda” of the framers of the Constitution when they assembled.15 Secrecy made it possible for it to emerge explicitly anyway, and surprisingly quickly. The two plans brought by members to the convention both alluded to the institution of slavery in their schemes of representation. The delegates noticed this instantly. Nothing was more important to the framers of the Constitution than representation. From the beginning of the convention, the great issues of representation and state sovereignty became entwined with the question of slaves as taxable wealth and as persons in, but seemingly not of, the polity.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“These closed-door procedures went against an important trend of the Revolutionary era toward publicity and popular participation in politics. That is why Thomas Jefferson called the secreted convention an “abominable precedent.” Modern commentators, apparently lacking Jefferson’s enthusiasm for public opinion, tend to praise the founders for intentionally restricting democracy at just the right moment so that a foundation for democracy could be laid.14 In any case, secrecy enabled the framers to speak with frankness, even to the point of “thinking out loud,” about issues as touchy as the relationship of slavery to government; in this fashion, compromises could be explored.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“John Adams agreed that the war effort required at least a temporary silence on slavery, and helped squash a bill enacting emancipation in Massachusetts.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“American liberty won the war; it undermined slavery in many places and in some minds, while in the end it confirmed slavery nationally.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The revolution to preserve British traditions had changed things, and it had liberated tens of thousands of slaves (recent estimates vary from 25,000 to 100,000). But it had also preserved slavery. The war had in part derived from the desire of slaveholders to protect their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, goals they pursued by trying to keep hold of their slaves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The revision process that eliminated the slavery passage and produced the final document suggests a growing concern with the fact of slaves in arms, as well as the compromises with slaveholding and slave-trading interests Jefferson remembered. Benjamin Franklin, who served on the drafting committee, suggested the insertion of “[He has] excited domestic insurrections among us” into the now-culminating accusation that the king had “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”18 The revised Declaration, in other words, made slave insurrection, with Indian warfare, the latest and perhaps greatest example of the king’s tyranny. The Declaration, then, had turned from antislavery in draft to anti-antislavery (if not proslavery) in publication.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“William Hooper, a delegate to the Congress from North Carolina, thought it a certainty that “our negroes are to be armed against us.” The black-British alliance decisively pushed planters in these states toward independence.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification