Constitution Of 1787 Dbq Essay

1301 Words6 Pages

The United States Constitution of 1787 was created in order to build a strong infrastructure for our country to pave a pathway for the future people in charge of the law. The topic in which the constitution was pro slavery or anti slavery was highly controversial for a number of reasons. This topic put the government into many debates though its constitutional convention as the word slavery itself was never said in the actual document. Even Though it was not said, it was clear that the ones in power were biased toward the slave owners in the country based on the provisions that were made. It may be debated as something in between as nothing was explicitly stated, but the three-fifths compromise stating that enslaved persons were not three fifths …show more content…

The Liberator, was an anti slavery newspaper that Garrison has his publication with where he talked about his views on the constitution and how he thought it separated the union. He aggressively criticized the constitution because of its allowing of this compromise and argued that its morals went against human rights. He sought the compromise to be unjustifiable as it was a way of seeing enslaved humans as property instead of human beings. Garrison and Douglass fought to see humans being equal in the acts of voting and to abolish this compromise as it was not something to fix political unfairness. More on the evidence that the constitution was said to be a pro-slavery document was the twenty year compromise. This compromise allowed for the unjust international slave trade to continue until the year 1808. This was to ban the government from regulating the importation of slaves so the southern states could stop the spread of slavery and keep it inside their territory. It also allowed for the state of Maine to join the Union as a so-called slave state; they did this to maintain a balance between the slave owner states and the free states of the United …show more content…

Again, Publius was the one who argued against this clause in hopes of keeping away friction between the slave owner slates and the free states. On top of his thoughts, the other two abolitionists I previously spoke about Douglass and Garrison, also criticized the clause. They showed that the Fugitive slave clause had a direct correction to violating human rights. ˇThis Clause would make it almost impossible for any sort of enslaved person to have any sort of freedom in there life. Garrison also argued about what this did for the citizens as a whole. This sort of act would make the slaveholder and free state individuals complicit, being that they had to act if they saw a runaway slave. Treating members of society like they aren’t human, and telling the other members to do the same

Open Document