KHH1

THE Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, and joined by abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.”

The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass. Yet the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery persists, notably among scholars and activists on the left who are rightly angry at America’s racist past. The myth, ironically, has led advocates for social justice to reject Lincoln’s and Douglass’s view of the Constitution in favor of Calhoun’s. And now the myth threatens to poison the current presidential campaign. The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.”

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact, as Lincoln and Douglass explained. It is one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.

Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. Yes, most white Americans presumed African inferiority. And in 1787, proslavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution. But on this matter the slaveholders were crushed.

James Madison (himself a slaveholder) opposed the ardent proslavery delegates and stated that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” The Constitutional Convention not only deliberately excluded the word “slavery,” but it also quashed the proslavery effort to make slavery a national institution, and so prevented enshrining the racism that justified slavery.

The property question was the key controversy. The delegates could never have created a federal union if they had given power to the national government to meddle in the property laws of the slave states. Slavery would have to be tolerated as a local institution. This hard fact, though, did not sanction slavery in national law, as a national institution, as so many critics presume. This sanction was precisely what the proslavery delegates sought with their failed machinations to ensure, as Madison wrote, that “some provision should be included in favor of property in slaves.” Most of the framers expected slavery to gradually wither away. They would do nothing to obstruct slavery’s demise.

The South did win some concessions at the convention, but they were largely consolation prizes. The notorious three-fifths clause tied slaveholding to political power, but proslavery delegates, led by South Carolinians, repeatedly pressed for slaves to be counted as full persons, which Charles Pinckney professed was “nothing more than justice.” They finally conceded to the three-fifths compromise. Over time, the congressional bulwark of the slave power became the Senate, where the three-fifths rule did not apply.
The proslavery delegates desperately wanted the Constitution to bar the national government from regulating the Atlantic slave trade, believing it would be an enormous blow against slavery. The first draft of the Constitution acceded to their bluster. But antislavery Northerners erupted in protest and proposed that the new government have the power not only to regulate the trade but also to abolish it after 1800. The proslavery men, over Madison’s furious objection, got the date extended to 1808, but it was a salvage operation.
In the convention’s waning days, proslavery delegates won a clause for the return of runaway slaves from free states. Yet the clause was a measure of slavery’s defensiveness, prompted by then landmark Northern gradual emancipation laws, and was so passively worded that enforcement was left to nobody, certainly not the federal government. Antislavery Northerners further refined the wording to ensure it did not recognize slaves as property.

As slavery was abolished throughout the North and as Southern slavery became an internal empire, proslavery advocates tried to reverse the framers’ work, claiming that, with the fugitive servant clause, the Constitution actually established slaves as property in national law. “[H]ave we not a right, under the Constitution, to our property in our slaves?” Senator Calhoun declared in 1840. This became the foundation for proslavery arguments about the expansion of slavery into the national territories that divided the nation in the 1850s.

Antislavery leaders answered with chapter and verse that the framers had refused to extend a constitutional right to property in slaves, and that therefore Congress was empowered to halt slavery’s expansion, putting slavery, in Lincoln’s phrase, on “the course of ultimate extinction.” Douglass broke with those abolitionists who, he said, “hold the Constitution to be a slaveholding instrument.” Running for president in 1860, Lincoln asserted that the framers had operated “on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” He added that “[t]o show all this is easy and certain.” It was so well understood in 1860 that it provoked the Civil War.

Far from a proslavery compact of “racist principles,” the Constitution was based on a repudiation of the idea of a nation dedicated to the proposition of property in humans. Without that antislavery outcome in 1787, slavery would not have reached “ultimate extinction” in 1865.

Sean Wilentz’s new book, “The Politicians & the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics,” will be published next spring.

vernon

wrong the war of northern agression started because lincoln didnt want the south to leave the union.
and just about every article you write is about race now everyone should know and understand what a racist you really are.

KHH1

Sean Wilentz’s new book, “The Politicians & the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics,” will be published next spring.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

No, the war of southern slave expansion started here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner

jelun

I remember that, I want to say there was a story on NPR.
I had never heard of the incident before that.
It's no wonder that it is so easy for people who are bent on not knowing our history to avoid it.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

It's one thing to not know something....that's understandable. Vernon and his kind, however, engage in propaganda. They know the history but completely invert it.

And then they believe their own BS.

jelun

I suppose either or both of us could be right, wrong or somewhere in between.
I just don't see vernon as that well educated or at all interested in being educated, it has occurred to me that he may be playing.
Mental illness is much more problematic than intelligence.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

And there it is: believing your own propaganda. There is no evidence that liberals are any more mentally challenged than conservatives. It's a meme you guys repeat until you believe it is true.

I've read enough of your posts to know you aren't playing.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

Once again, you have nothing factual to add. The first battle of Bull Run happened in July 1861.

The battle of Ft. Sumter, where Confederates attacked a Union fort happened in April of that year. That was the first battle of the Civil War.

Again proving only that you believe your own propaganda, which has nothing to do with the facts of history.

The caning in Congress was a metaphor I used about Southern aggression in defense of and expansion of slavery.

http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/fort-sumter.html

http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/bullrun.html

Seems to me you're the only one running his mouth.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

It was a Federal fort. The Confederates attacked it. The Feds already owned it, they wouldn't have had to steal it from themselves.

jelun

And they are still thinking the same way in 2015, federal troops were going to take over the southwest.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

Yup....it's one of the reasons I maintain that confederate sympathizers are victims of their own propaganda. To me, it's the only explanation for statements like 'that the Civil War was not about slavery', when even the secession documents point to slavery as the cause. It's not just ignorance, it's willful ignorance.

jelun

And widespread, there are educated whites in the county where the murderers of Emmett Till were acquitted who deny any responsibility for the racism of that decision because ET was beaten and tortured and killed in a neighboring county.
How nonsensical is that? The white men of Tallahatchie County were the ones who turned that trial into a circus and a message reinforcing the statement that "blood will flow...".
This is just like reading the pages of OPP.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

Agreed.

It's just like with the Birmingham bombing. The white power structure did not go for 'justice'....instead it protected the perpetrators. I think that one of the reasons conservatives are so averse to the idea of 'white guilt', accusing liberals of that notion constantly as a weakness of some kind, is to avoid coming to grips with the fact that whites WERE guilty of racial violence in this country since it's inception. It would take a lot of introspection and soul searching to come to grips with our past when thinking about race.

Dave Loc: Upstate New York

I wonder if one can talk about any race not having a history of racial violence in their past - and perhaps a better issue, contemporary instances of racial violence being more prominent in one race versus another.