Slavery's Constitution

The Constitution never directly mentions slavery; the word itself does not appear. And yet of the Constitution’s 84 clauses, six are directly concerned with slaves and their owners, and five others had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification. In Slavery’s Constitution, historian David Waldstreicher examines the effects of the slavery issue on the Revolution itself, on the framing of the Constitution and on the public ratification debate that followed.

Waldstreicher begins by exploring the role the politics of slavery played in the Revolution, explaining how the ruling of the English court in the famous case of the escaped Virginia slave James Somerset—a ruling narrowly in favor of the slave’s personal rights under the British constitution—made it clear to American slaveholders that they had as much to fear from English parliamentary sovereignty as tax-protesting American merchants did. With antislavery and American subjection going hand in hand, slavery itself propelled wealthy American planters toward revolution.

He then looks at how the framers discussed, bargained and agonized over slavery during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and shows how the compromises they reached welded together two dimensions of the politics of slavery: slavery as a form of governance over certain people, and slavery as an economic institution.

Waldstreicher also examines clause by clause how the Constitution took slavery into account, including the famous three-fifths clause that apportioned representatives and direct taxes by adding the whole number of free persons to three-fifths of “all other persons.” Those “other persons” were, of course, slaves, and Waldstreicher notes that this apportionment actually favored people who owned other people, giving slaveholders that much more control over the three-fifths more taxes they would pay. “In the new American order,” he observes, “taxation with representation and slavery were joined at the hip.”

Finally, Waldstreicher outlines the debate to ratify the Constitution, and analyzes the appearance of slavery in The Federalist Papers. During ratification strikingly few people in the Deep South criticized the Constitution for being insufficiently pro-slavery, and Waldstreicher observes that the relative absence of debate on the topic in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia speaks volumes: the dominant planter classes were satisfied by what the Convention had produced.

In making the case that slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery, Slavery’s Constitution is a provocative reassessment of the birth of our nation.