The Constitution Was Never Pro-Slavery By Allen C. Guelzo

The Constitution Was Never Pro-Slavery By Allen C. Guelzo

To read the Constitution as pro-slavery, in the manner of Finkelman, Waldstreicher, and even Sanders, requires a suspension of disbelief that only playwrights and morticians could admire. Yes, the Constitution reduced slaves to the hated three-fifths; but that was to keep slaveholders from claiming them for five-fifths in determining representation, which would have increased the power of the slaveholding states. Yes, the Constitution permitted the slave trade to continue; but it also permitted Congress to shut it off, which it did in 1808. Yes, the Constitution banned export taxes, required “full faith and credit,” and limited “privileges and immunities” to citizens. But the debates over those provisions betrayed no inkling that the hidden subject was slavery. And the accusation that the militia clause was meant to suppress slave insurrections was actually only a speculation tossed off at one moment of energetic accusation by Gouverneur Morris, not a deliberately conceived strategy by scheming slaveholders.

Another brilliant analysis by Guelzo, one of my favorite historians.