Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

Taking on decades of received scholarly wisdom, David Waldstreicher has written the first book to acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the origins and Language of the U.S. Constitution. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet of its eighty-four clauses, six are directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clauses had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification. Neither a moral blind spot for America's otherwise enlightened framers nor the expression of a mere economic interest, slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery. Slavery indeed was less than six degrees of separation from every major political issue in pre-Civil War America. One reason for this is that slavery was a major aspect of the American economy. The livelihoods of people in the North as well as the South depended on the products of slave labour, on import and export policies, and on the running of related services. Therefore, because the Constitution had economic implications and set the stage for a national economy, it could not avoid having implications for slavery, and creating a constitutional politics of slavery.