Examine the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom and expl

Question

Examine the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom and explain who "we the people" included and excluded, and whose civil liberties the Constitution protected. Read the three slavery clauses and the preamble to the Constitution. You may consult the textbook and internet for added information on the Constitutional Convention.  

Answer the questions that follow:

1. Give three examples from the text, The Warmth of Other Suns, that represent what exactly the three-fifths clause meant and how it increased the political power of the South.

2. How did the fugitive-slave clause make slavery a national institution, one that was recognized and protected even in non-slave states?

3. Who did "we the people" include and exclude? In what sense did the Constitution protect slaveholders' right to property in slaves?

4. Is the Constitution a racist document? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

b. The Three-Fifths compromise gave southern states disproportionate representation in the House of Representatives relative to free states, thereby helping the southern states to preserve slavery. During the US Constitutional Convention delegates from northern states wanted House of Representatives representation to be directly proportional to the number of free inhabitants in each state. Conversely, delegates from southern states wanted representation to be proportional to both free inhabitants and slaves in each state even though slaves did not have the right to vote for their representatives. The two sides ultimately compromised and counted slaves as three-fifths of a person.

2. The text of the Fugitive Slave Clause is:

No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.

Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution,” argues that it is a “myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery.” Instead, the Princeton professor demonstrates a woeful misreading of the debates over the drafting of the Constitution. That the document does not contain the words “slave” or “slavery” in no way indicates that it was written to reject the institution. In the debates, the delegates almost always employed euphemisms such as “this unique species of property,” “this unhappy class,” or “such other persons,” as stand-ins for the more repugnant “slaves.” They simply carried that practice over to the final document.

But whether or not the words appear in the text of the Constitution, they dominate its spirit. Slavery was instrumental to the economic well-being of not only the states in which it was pervasive, but also in the North. As such, slavery profoundly altered the four months of Constitutional debate, both with respect to obvious issues, such as how slaves would be counted for apportionment, and some more indirect, such as how often would the census be taken, or how a president would be elected. By the time slavery had indeed become a national institution.

3. a. “we the people” extolled in the Constitution 225 years ago did not include people who looked like him.

But the Declaration of Independence did, he contended, and that was something that a black kid growing up in Savannah, Ga., was told early on.

In reality, African-Americans were not categorically excluded from the “people” who established the Constitution. The “We the People” in the preamble of the Constitution refers to those people who “ordained and established this Constitution for the United States of America.” And, despite the existence of brutal slavery and racial discrimination, some blacks were included in that group. As Justice Benjamin Curtis pointed out in his dissent, at least five states at the time of the Founding allowed free blacks to become citizens on the same terms as whites, and also gave them the right to participate the elections for the state conventions that ratified the Constitution:

It has been often asserted that the Constitution was made exclusively by and for the white race but in five of the thirteen original States, coloured persons then possessed the elective franchise, and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. If so, it is not true, in point of fact that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race. And that it was made exclusively for the white race is, in my opinion, not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity. And as free coloured persons were then citizens of at least five States, and so in every sense part of the people of the United States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.

b. The Framers debated over the extent to which slavery would be included, permitted, or prohibited in the Constitution. In the end, they created a document of compromise that represented the interests of the nation as they knew it and predicted it to be in the future. Explaining the Framers’ and the Constitution understands of slavery requires a careful look at the three clauses which deal with the issue. An analysis of the three-fifths compromise, the slave trade clause, and the fugitive-slave law all point to the Framers’ intentions in the creation of the Constitution and prove that it neither authorized nor prohibited slavery.

The first indication of slavery in the Constitution appears in Article I, Section 2. This is the three-fifths clause that explains the apportionment of representation and taxation. It reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.

4. The argument that the Constitution is racist suffers from one fatal flaw: the concept of race does not exist in the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution—or in the Declaration of Independence, for that matter—are human beings classified according to race, skin colour, or ethnicity (nor, one should add, sex, religion, or any other of the left’s favoured groupings). Our founding principles are colour blind (although our history, regrettably, has not been).

The Constitution speaks of people, citizens, persons, other persons (a euphemism for slaves) and Indians not taxed (in which case, it is their tax-exempt status, and not their skin colour, that matters). The first references to “race” and “colour” occur in the 15th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote, ratified in 1870.

The infamous three-fifths clause, which more nonsense has been written than any other clause, does not declare that a black person is worth 60% of a white person. It says that for purposes of determining the number of representatives for each state in the House (and direct taxes), the government would count only three-fifths of the slaves, and not all of them, as the Southern states, who wanted to gain more seats, had insisted. The 60,000 or so free blacks in the North and the South were counted on par with whites.

Contrary to a popular misconception, the Constitution also does not say that only white males who owned property could vote. The Constitution defers to the states to determine who shall be eligible to vote (Article I, Section 2, and Clause 1). It is a little known fact of American history that black citizens were voting in perhaps as many as 10 states at the time of the founding.

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