Slavery and the Constitution
Resources:

From Exploring Constitutional Conflicts: the 13th Amendment and the Abolition of Slavery

"Pro-Slavery Constitution and Current Day Race Relations" by Paul Finkelman

A lesson plan using Maryland's State Constitution of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence

African Americans and the end of Slavery in Massachusetts -- includes the several petitions

 

 

 

 

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 The word "slave" does not appear in the Constitution. The framers consciously avoided the word, recognizing that it would sully the document. Nevertheless, slavery received important protections in the Constitution:
  • The notorious Three-fifths clause--which counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representation--gave the South extra representation in the House and extra votes in the Electoral College. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 if not for the Three-fifths compromise.
  • The Constitution also prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years. A fugitive slave clause required the return of runaway slaves to their owners.
  • The Constitution gave the federal government the power to put down domestic rebellions, including slave insurrections.

(Source: Digital History: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=293)

Article I, Section 2 Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
   
Article I, Section. 9. The Migration of Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

Article IV, Section2. No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

  • The Society of Friends, whose adherents were known as Quakers, was reflected in emerging concerns over the presence of slavery. As early as 1688, four German Quakers in Germantown near Philadelphia protested slavery in a resolution that condemned the "traffic of Men-body."  It was not until 1758, however, that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends made buying or selling a slave a bar to leadership in the Quaker meetings, and in 1774 it became cause for being disowned or banished from the Society.
  • The intellectual arguments for slavery's abolition also were strengthened by the writings of >John Locke and others arguing for the recognition of natural rights of all men--the same positions also used to justify the revolt against the British Crown--and the mid-1770s saw additional abolitionist movements along with the conflict that would lead to the Revolutionary War. In 1775, The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was founded and later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, with Benjamin Franklin later assuming its presidency.
  • In 1780, Pennsylvania enacted the "Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery," the first law in America mandating an eventual end to slavery, allowing any slave born after March 1, 1780, to be freed at the end of twenty-eight years.   (http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/research/americanhistory/ap_regionalconflict.php)

“To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,”  Phillis Wheatley writes:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such was my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (24-31)

Source: http://www.uncp.edu/home/hickss/taal/wheatley/index.html)