Pros And Cons Of The American Constitution

David Waldstreicher, an American historian, has claimed that the American Constitution is a ‘”pro-slavery’” document in his article published in 2015. In Waldstreicher's article and Sean Wilentz article also published in 2015 they both state that the Constitution refused to mention slavery as property and according to Abraham Lincoln in Wilentz’s article “Lincoln asserted that the framers had operated ‘on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man’”. The American Constitution is a pro-slavery document that even though not wholly stating components within it that would entirely abolish slavery, but it also would not say that humans cannot be determined property. The U.S. Constitution is a pro-slavery

In the first draft of the Constitution, it obeyed with proslavery delegates who wanted the Constitution to stop the government from regulating the slave trade in the Atlantic because they believed it would have a terrible effect against slavery. Once this first draft was published, antislavery northerners protested and proposed that the government should have the power to regulate and even abolish slavery after 1808. Having even the first draft of the document state that the government would not have rights over slaveholders in the south reinforces the claim of the Constitution being a proslavery document. The reason they changed the first draft is that of the uproar it was causing with the Northerners who were antislavery. If there was no backlash, this section might have been kept the same and unchanged, but because of the backlash, the Constitution was forced to change which in the end decided to compromise for each side of the spectrum vaguely. In one of the final paragraphs of Wilentz’s article it states that “As slavery was abolished throughout the North and as Southern slavery became an internal empire, proslavery advocates tried to reverse the framers’ work, claiming that… the Constitution established slaves as property in national law” (Wilentz p.2). in 1840 Senator Calhoun’s quote became the

In Article One Section Two of the Constitution states that the number of people in each state can include any free person, and excluding Indians not taxed and three-fifths of all other persons. The “other” people are slaves who added power to the southern states and not to the northern states. This allowed the southern states to have a higher number of delegates and taxation within the states. Allowing more delegates, these states would have more power in votes to keep slavery and not let it be abolished. The U.S. Constitution failed to bring up slaves as property and as a person. Instead, the document tries to meet in the middle of the arguments received from antislavery and proslavery supporters. Abraham Lincoln claimed that Framer’s purposefully left out specific features in the Constitution regarding the ability to consider a person as property, this may have been due to the backlash it was given from the first draft it published. The way the Constitution was set up seems to be that it was tried to get as close as it could to each side of the spectrum without crossing it and allowing both sides to feel they won with the way each article was written. But the three-fifths clause is what most historians are focused on regarding the proslavery claim. The Three-fifths gave southern states more power than they would have had because they were