Did the Constitution Lay the Groundwork for Abolition?

This week, I had the opportunity to talk with Professor Kenneth Williams and Judge Cory Liu on a Federalist Society online panel about how the American founding fathers looked at slavery—and particularly, to address the question: did the Constitution lay the groundwork for abolition? If you missed it, you can watch it here:

As I argue in the video, the Constitution was, indeed, written so that—in Abraham Lincoln’s words—“the public mind [could] rest in the belief that [slavery] [was] in the course of ultimate extinction.”

Most strikingly, the Constitution made no explicit reference to slavery at all, let alone providing it with any permanent guarantees. Instead, it left the question of slavery open to political resolution, and at the time the Constitution was written political leaders had good reason to believe that slavery was dying under its own economic inefficiency. It was only in about the 1820s and 1830s that southern politicians, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, renounced the principles of the American Revolution and began to argue instead that slavery was “a positive good.” That, and the timid compromises of northern leaders, put slavery in a position where it might not be extinguished, but might actually be perpetual. And the war came.

In the discussion, I recommend the book Arguing About Slavery by William Lee Miller, which focuses on the “petition crisis” of the 1830s and 1840s, and on John Quincy Adams’s heroic attacks on slavery in Congress. Other good sources on these questions include the works of Harry V. Jaffa, particularly his Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom.

But you cannot do better than reading the writings of the people themselves, and particularly the writings of Abraham Lincoln (especially his response to the Dred Scott case and his Cooper Union Address) and Frederick Douglass, particularly the complete version of his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and “The Constitution: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?”

Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation