Although the United States Constitution has never contained the words "slave" or "slavery" within its text, it dealt directly with American slavery in at least five of its provisions and indirectly protected the institution elsewhere in the document. [1] [2]
At the time of the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, and its ratification in 1789, slavery was banned by the states in New England and Pennsylvania and by the Congress of the Confederation in the Northwest Territory, by the Northwest Ordinance. Though slaves were present in other states, most were forced to work in agriculture in the South.
According to H. W. Brands, because of the declining productivity of crops like tobacco due to soil exhaustion, many of the drafters of the Constitution assumed that slavery would die out naturally in the South as it had done in industrialized North. This changed with the invention of the modern cotton gin in 1793, which provided a more sustainable and economically viable crop for Southern plantations. [3] [4]
Throughout U.S. history there have been disputes about whether the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery. James Oakes writes that the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause and Three-Fifths Clause "might well be considered the bricks and mortar of the proslavery Constitution". [5] "But", Oakes adds, "there was also an antislavery Constitution.... Congress was granted the power to make 'all needful rules and regulations' for the territories, and for decades after ratification hardly anyone doubted that this authorized the federal government to ban slavery from the territories.... [6] Then there was the familiar assertion that the principle of fundamental human equality was embodied in the Constitution.... Doesn't the Preamble state that the purpose of the federal government was to 'secure the blessings of liberty' ... ? Similarly, the Fifth Amendment declares that 'no person' could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." [7] The Fifth Amendment, however, was a two-edged sword. In Dred Scott v. Sandford , Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution". [8]
Oakes continues: "Throughout the decades-long debate over slavery and the Constitution some of the most contentious issues arose over constitutional principles that cannot be found in the actual wording of the Constitution. Nowhere does the Constitution state that Congress cannot 'interfere' with slavery or abolition in a state, yet it was widely agreed that it could not. Nor does the Constitution expressly recognize a right of 'property in man'.... Given that the Constitution was the handiwork of men who disagreed about slavery, it is hardly surprising that it could be—and was—read as both proslavery and antislavery." [9] Oakes' view is that, "depending on which clauses you cite and how you spin them, the Constitution can be read as either proslavery or antislavery". [10]
In The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?, Frederick Douglass cites the Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 left behind by James Madison in order to describe four provisions of the Constitution that are said to be pro-slavery. In examining the history of how the clauses were debated and structured, he argues either that they are not pro-slavery or that they do not concern slavery.
He argues that the Three-Fifths Clause (Article I, section 2) "deprives [slave] States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation"; that the Migration or Importation Clause (Article I, section 9) allowed Congress to end the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808; that the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, section 2) does not apply to slaves but rather to "Person[s] held to Service or Labour", which do not include slaves, because a slave "is a simple article of property. He does not owe and cannot owe service. He cannot even make a contract"; and that the clause giving Congress the power to "suppress Insurrections" (Article I, section 8) gives Congress the power to end slavery, "[i]f it should turn out that slavery is a source of insurrection, [and] that there is no security from insurrection while slavery lasts...."
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate slaves around the world.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt racism, judicial activism, poor legal reasoning, and crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". A future chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".
Dred Scott was an enslaved African American man who, along with his wife, Harriet, unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott decision". The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slave holders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period.
Historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the 11 Southern states that declared their secession from the United States and united to form the Confederate States of America. However, while historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just "a cause" of the war but "the cause" according to Civil War historian Chris Mackowski—they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict were most important, and on the North’s reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view that has been disproven by the overwhelming historical evidence against it, notably the seceding states' own secession documents.
The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in a state's total population. This count would determine: the number of seats in the House of Representatives; the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated; and how much money the states would pay in taxes. Slave holding states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures; this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free blacks and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise, and each was counted as one full person for representation.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner.
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 precluded a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited Blacks from being taken out of the free state of Pennsylvania into slavery. The Court overturned the conviction of slavecatcher Edward Prigg as a result.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power held by American slaveowners in the federal government of the United States during the Antebellum period. Antislavery campaigners charged that this small group of wealthy slaveholders had seized political control of their states and were trying to take over the federal government illegitimately to expand and protect slavery. The claim was later used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
The Missouri Compromise was a federal legislation of the United States that balanced desires of northern states to prevent expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
The Liberty Party was an abolitionist political party in the United States prior to the American Civil War. The party experienced its greatest activity during the 1840s, while remnants persisted as late as 1860. It supported James G. Birney in the presidential elections of 1840 and 1844. Others who attained prominence as leaders of the Liberty Party included Gerrit Smith, Salmon P. Chase, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, and William Goodell. They attempted to work within the federal system created by the United States Constitution to diminish the political influence of the Slave Power and advance the cause of universal emancipation and an integrated, egalitarian society.
Lemmon v. New York, or Lemmon v. The People (1860), popularly known as the Lemmon Slave Case, was a freedom suit initiated in 1852 by a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The petition was granted by the Superior Court in New York City, a decision upheld by the New York Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" was a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. In the address, Douglass states that positive statements about perceived American values, such as liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because they lacked those rights. Douglass referred not only to the captivity of enslaved people, but to the merciless exploitation and the cruelty and torture that slaves were subjected to in the United States.
Commonwealth v. Aves, 35 Mass. 193 (1836), was a case in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on the subject of transportation of slaves to free states. In August 1836, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled that slaves brought to Massachusetts "for any temporary purpose of business or pleasure" were entitled to freedom. The case was the most important legal victory for abolitionists in the 1830s and set a major precedent throughout the North.
"The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?" is a speech that Frederick Douglass gave on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, in which he rejected arguments made by slaveholders as well as by fellow abolitionists as to the nature and meaning of the United States Constitution. The popularity of the speech led to its being published as a pamphlet.
Following the creation of the United States in 1776 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, the legal status of slavery was generally a matter for individual U.S. state legislatures and judiciaries As such, slavery flourished in some states, and withered on the vine in others. On the whole, the former Thirteen Colonies abolished slavery relatively slowly, if at all, with several Northern states using gradual emancipation systems in which freedom would be granted after so many years of life or service.