Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document?
Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document?
Gordon S. Wood, January 12, 2021, The New York Times
Gordon S. Wood reviews The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, by James Oakes
It was not long after the federal
Constitution was created in 1787 that many antislavery Northerners began
labeling it a pro-slavery document. Parts of it did support slavery
— the clause that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person, which
gave the slave states greater representation in Congress and the
Electoral College than opponents of slavery believed they deserved;
and the fugitive slave clause, which required persons held to service
who had escaped to free states to be returned to their owners.
Because these poisonous clauses seemed to enable Southern
slaveholders to dominate the national government in the early decades of
the 19th century, the rabid abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
eventually concluded that the Constitution was a “covenant with death”
and “an agreement with hell.” Oddly this view of the Constitution as a
pro-slavery document was what the fervent hard-line apologists for
slavery, like Senator John C. Calhoun and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney,
believed as well.
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