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Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

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The impact of slavery on the US Constitution is a fact insufficiently explored. An analysis would have been welcome. Five questions (and more) need answering:

(a) Which clauses were inserted to "protect" the peculiar institution? The 3/5 rule changing the representation key (both in the House and in the Electoral College) springs to mind. There are other rules.

(b) Which clauses were "altered" so as favorably to affect the peculiar institution? The prohibition of export taxes or the cap on duties for the importation of persons may not be the only ones.

(c) Which collateral arrangements were struck (e.g. Northwest Ordinance) and implied?

(d) What did the 2nd Amendment mean in the context of slavery?

(e) Which issues were left unresolved so as to prevent conflicts? This is a difficult silent/counterfactual question, but the federal/state split in responsibility for citizenship/suffrage clearly gives the state leeway in excluding "unwanted" votes. So is the absurdity that slaves born in the US were denied citizenship despite the jus soli established by statute in 1790.

All of this is critical for understanding the role on the Constitution in maintaining slavery - and eventually precluding a constitutional ending to it. How we got to the compromise text or how it was sold to the "people" (1.5 % of "we the people" voted on it) is a subsidiary matter.

In writing this short book the author chose a "narrative" approach that privileges timelines and tactics over substance and analysis. Some of the answers are there, but drowned in the din of day to day politicking by personalities. This is regrettable. The issue of whether the Constitution is "silent" on slavery is a key issue when assessing whether it is a meta-historical framework, or very much a "child of the times".

Sometimes one gets the feeling that a text was written as an obligation to be dispensed with hurriedly, or to meet a deadline, or a career goal. Meandering, superficial at crucial points, and garrulous at others, the text does not engage. The final chapter - the rehash of the ratification debates - tastes like filler.

This book is a welcome addition to my bookshelves, as it help document the reasons the framers gave us a Constitutional oligarchy rather than a democracy or a republic, and why they lied about it.

Two of the many people you can't trust in this world are slaveholders and politicians, and many of the framers were both.

Recently, a democratic candidate for Congress asked me why I seem (in his opinion) to make a religion of democracy. He, of course, like the framers, believes that there are more important things, such as property rights, business interests, and power. So what if Americans don't have a real voice in government, as long as their betters have the power to make their decisions for them?

Although this country's founders used the right and duty to establish a democratic form of government as justification for their revolution from England, the first thing the framers did was betray that right and trample on that duty.

So here we are in 2010, having "exported democracy" by totally destroying one of the oldest civilizations on earth (Iraq), and continuing our wars of aggression (crimes against humanity) and crony bailouts in the name of and with the consent of citizens of whom a majority oppose both policies, but who do not yet realize that their vote is NOT a voice in government, but just the consent of the governed to allow unaccountable representatives to do whatever they wish.

A recent Rasmussen Report [...] poll showed that only 21% of Americans believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed. But they don't need your consent, your vote is sufficient, and most people will ignore war crimes and fiscal treachery in order to vote for or against the selfish hot-button issues that political operatives use to draw people to the polls.

Slavery, of course, remains intact in the U.S. to this very day. Rather than being abolished by the 13th Amendment, it was established as legal punishment for a crime, and it was the oligarchy who would decide what was and wasn't a crime and who would and wouldn't be charged with and punished for it.

David Waldstreicher's research takes the ordinary citizen inside the secret meetings where the Constitution was drawn up and makes the intent of the framers visible. Their intent was never to establish a democracy or a republic, but to consolidate power and to perpetuate inequality. In this they succeeded.