Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification Book

I found it extremely difficult to understand what exactly this book was arguing. The entire third chapter recounts information about the debates that took place before ratification, but does not argue its point much at all as to who had a point and who was wrong. He makes almost no judgments on that issue. He then makes very decisive statements out of the blue that seem to assume that he's already made his point, and I am left to wonder where exactly it was.

I am convinced of Waldstreicher's claim about how important the debate on slavery was to the formulation of the Constitution. But by the same token, the information he includes in the book convinces me that the Constitution successfully avoids protecting slavery longer than 1808, just like the Constitution's text itself suggests. I simply don't understand what the need is for him to try to argue anything more than that the discussion of slavery was important the Founders. Why he tries to assert that the Constitution is somehow owned by slavery or tainted by it is inexplicable to me (as if it were a profound observation).

History itself seems to argue quite bluntly against his worries. In the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Constitution specifically outlawed slavery. Why make any argument at all as to the supposed dangerous nature of the Constitution's yoke with slavery? If it made any sense at all, I would deduce from this book that Waldstreicher was trying to argue for the position that we should go back in time and un-ratify the Constitution so as to avoid its pro-slavery implications. Perhaps he is saying that the question of whether slavery would ever be outlawed was more "up-in-the-air" than we are led to believe, living in the time after it was outlawed. If so, he does not give us any alternative suggestions as to how this could have happened. He simply demonstrates in several ways the already obvious fact that slavery was ingrained into the Constitution at least until 1808.

The Constitution was first and foremost a document defining governmental structure - not a suggestion as to the type of laws which the Founders hoped that government would pass. The book fails to address this at all, but it remains the cornerstone on which all questions of Constitutional intent must rest.

The book seeks to emphasize the ambiguity of the constitution's language regarding slavery as proof of pro-slavery intent, but in fact ambiguity cannot prove intent. Ambiguity on the matter of slavery is as neutral a compromise as could be made, as evidenced by the fact that both pro-slavery and anti-slavery governments existed at different times after the Constitution's ratification. The fact of silence certainly proves that the Founders failed to abolish slavery, but it also proves that they failed to secure its Constitutional validation, again, until the date on which it said this validation stopped. Isn't Waldstreicher engaging in exactly the type of perception management that it accuses the Founders of having engaged in in order to successfully ratify the document?

The book asserts that the use of terms such as "persons" (Article I, Section 9, Clause 1) and "property" (Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2) are euphemisms that betray a pro-slavery intent. Is Waldstreicher arguing that the Constitution ought to have enshrined the word "slaves" instead? What is the argument here? How could he be missing the more obvious fact that the word "persons" is correct - that the Constitution here very well might be trying to deconstruct the central lie at the heart of the institution of slavery: that they are slaves because they lack personhood? But to Waldstreicher, somehow it all works the other way around. Rather than deducing that the founders were criticizing the word "slave" for being a euphemism for "person," he deduces that they meant "person" as a euphemism for "slave."

"The founders' Constitution simultaneously evades, legalizes, and calibrates slavery, as it does so much else, including its very raison d'être, the creation of a stronger federal republic. No more than it does slavery, the Constitution does not mention nationhood - for fear of offending the localists - rendering it all the more an ideal national charter for soft selling its version of a modern nation-state." (page 101)

Waldstreicher here seems to be suggesting that there was no compromise going on at all: rather, a conspiracy in which all the founders were complicit.

"In the process [of ratification], [slavery] was not so much forgotten as contained." (page 102)

Is the containment of slavery a bad thing? Could it have been abolished or curtailed instead? The book makes no venture to argue so.

"The business of slavery had not been left unfinished so much as it had been leveraged." (page 103)

By whom? Not once does the book offer any clarity as to which delegates are to blame in particular. I wonder which delegates Waldstreicher would have considered blameworthy if he had attempted to do so? The Southern delegates, perhaps? Perhaps the Yankee/Carolina proslavery alliance he elsewhere refers to?

"Franklin put it most eloquently: 'The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good.' Who could say this constitution was not the best human hands could make?" (page 103)

Perhaps Franklin would say that - in the quote that was cited just now?

"Silence and compromise became virtues." (page 104)

This seems to me to be the closest Waldstreicher ever comes to making his intentions clear. Waldstreicher is angry - very angry - that the antislavery delegates didn't somehow forge a more antislavery deal with those sympathetic to slavery. He clearly believes that the antislavery delegates are the ones to blame for this. However, he offers no evidence of any points at which they could have held their ground to achieve better results whatsoever. He clearly does not believe that the antislavery delegates are as antislavery as they could have been (notwithstanding their cited opinions on the matter or the historical evidence which included slavery's abolition). One might be forgiven for wondering if he has any similar bones to pick with the proslavery delegates, given how much time he spends deciphering the various shades of evil to be found in the antislavery delegates' profound "silence and compromise."

On the contrary, the fact of compromise could just as easily demonstrate that things go the other way around - that the Constitution's text must be considered anti-slavery insofar as it uses words like "persons" and "property" while failing to otherwise justify the use of these terms in relation to each other. The book provided more than enough proof that the belief among many of the Framers was that slavery was at odds with the Constitution's aims. If words such as "persons" and "property" were mere euphemisms for slavery, how can this not be considered subversion of the opposite sort? Can this not instead be considered a willful dilution of pro-slavery intent? The use of the word "persons" in the context of slavery did turn out in history to be the Achilles heel of the pro-slavery understanding of the Constitution. The three fifths compromise and the fugitive slave clauses both use the term "persons" rather than "slaves." Is he trying convince us it would have been better for the antislavery cause if they had ratified the term "slaves"? The book makes no effort to give us any clues as to whether alternatives existed.

The book's biggest problem is in formulating a concept of what the Constitution is which exists apart from the actual legal text which the thirteen states ratified. The book does not succeed in escaping the conundrum of this discrepancy except by proposing to tell a narrative history that it hopes the reader will accept in much the same way it accuses others of doing in their acceptance of the supposed "ideological" view it is supplanting (which has similar issues and is worth criticizing). The book provides evidence of many anti-slavery Framers expressing fears that the Constitution would be misused, but the fact that those same men also pushed for its ratification might help prove that their fear was mixed with hope. It might suggest a willful allowance for the shape of government to be defined legally by the states through further debate.

To Waldstreicher, it just proves that they were lying.

I do not think Waldstreicher's argument about the Constitution being "slavery's" Constitution was proven. And I do not think for a moment that anyone involved considered the Constitution as originally ratified to be the United States' eternal, unchanging authority on which laws could be passed through its structured political means. Amendments to the Constitution were passed almost immediately after its ratification to address numerous significant issues called the Bill of Rights.

The book is clearly arguing that it was a willful misinterpretation of the Constitution that allowed for slavery's abolition. Lincoln and Douglass were not taking advantage of purposeful ambiguities - they were working against the grain the Founders intended. For what, indeed, other than proslavery sentiments could inspire them to refer to slaves in euphemistic terms such as "persons"? The series of toasts made by Northern black men in the conclusion is framed as being a form of willful subversion of the Constitution's intent, on the chance that future freedom might be secured by such examples of shrewd verbal maneuvering (another way of putting it is that he is accusing those men of deception). It is yet another example of the book's insistence that in so many cases, you simply cannot take people at their word. I am inclined not to take Waldstreicher at his word.

If he had argued merely that the issue of slavery was integral to the discussion of national identity, I would have agreed, because the book provided considerable evidence of that.