It isn’t hard to find articles on the Internet that make the case that it does. Consider these quotes.
- “The three-fifths clause is the most obvious example of How Constitutional arrangements protected slavery.”—Paul Finkelman in an article titled “How the Proslavery Constitution Shaped American Race Relations”
- “The three-fifths clause, which states that three-fifths of ‘all other persons’ (i.e. slaves) will be counted for both taxation and representation, was a major boon to the slave states.…On balance, the Constitution was deliberately ambiguous—but operationally proslavery.”— David Waldstreicher, in an article titled “How the Constitution was Indeed Pro-Savery” and appearing at theatlantic.com
- “Rather than halting or slowing the importation of slaves in the south, slavery had been given a new life—a political life. Even when the law stopped the importing of new slaves in 1808, the south continued to increase its overall political status and electoral votes by adding and breeding slaves illegally. The Three-fifths Compromise would not be challenged again until the Dred Scott case in 1856.”—An article titled “The Three-Fifths Compromise”
- “We must conclude…that the Constitutional framers’ failure to adequately address slavery was an act of perpetuating the institution of slavery itself; indeed, the refusal of the delegates to confront slavery and include provisions for its end would be a costly error.”—An article titled “Was the Constitution of 1789 anti-slavery or pro-slavery?”
- “The final text of the slave trade provision was designed to disguise what the Convention had done. It is important to understand that the clause did not require an end to the trade in 1808. Moreover, it reflected the assumption, held by almost everyone at the Convention, that the Deep South would grow faster than the rest of the nation, and that by 1808 the states that most wanted to continue the trade would have enough political power, and enough allies, to prevent an end to it. Ending the trade would require that a bill pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president. That process would give the supporters of the trade three opportunities to stop such a bill.”—An article titled “The Slave Trade and the Constitution”
- In answering the question Why was the U.S. Constitution pro slavery? answers.com not only assumes the premise of the question to be true, but it also implies that the Constitution’s Framers were more than willing to justify slavery as a means to achieve the ends they desired. According to answers.com, the U.S. Constitution was pro slavery “Because, at the time, slavery helped the country to grow economically and they needed to grow the economy because they had recently suffered from wars.”
Despite these perspectives, as we said last week, the fact that slavery continued in America for many years beyond the ratification of the Constitution may not tell the whole story. To find out more, we need to reach beyond a surface understanding of what happened in Philadelphia in 1787.
This page is part of a larger article. Return to The Importance of Getting History Right, Part 2.
Copyright © 2016 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All Rights Reserved.
Websites and videos in this article have been cited for information purposes only. No citation should be construed as an endorsement.