American Idealism at its BirthMike Walker, Col USMC (ret)
Some American colleges and universities have received heat for posing in some form the question below:
Yes or no, the United States Constitution was designed to advance slavery?
The question is great. The national disgrace is that so few students can muster a coherent argument for the obvious answer: No. Why? Because of the lousy history education too many received on the two subjects at hand: The Constitution and slavery.
At that great historic moment in the late 18thcentury, a great many in the United States did not want the newly created nation to be just another country in the world and the issue of slavery struck at the heart of that dream.
So what if the known world in the 1770s-1780s embraced the enslavement of people and in the case of many countries had done so for centuries upon centuries?
These American visionaries did not want to be just like everyone else. They wanted a country that continuously strove for a more perfect union of states. They wanted a nation that sought to be better in the future than they were today.
For them it did not matter that slavery was the norm in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, Southwest Asia, the Indian Sub-Continent, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It did not mater to them that the planet, almost as a complete whole, embraced slavery.[1]
Unlike the rest of the world at that time, there was a deep and strongly rooted sense of American independence and exceptionalism. A great many that embraced American independence and exceptionalism stood against slavery from day one. The newly formed United States could not rid the world of slavery but brave Americans believed they could begin to end it.
It was a hard fight to end slavery and proved far harder than many ever imagined. Undeterred, it began in the United States even before the War for Independence was won or the Constitution written.
Vermont put limits on slavery in 1777 and later banned it. Pennsylvania moved to abolish slavery over time in 1780. In Pennsylvania, after 1780 no new slaves could be added to the population and all children of slaves were born free. Massachusetts went even farther in 1783, ending slavery immediately and freed all slaves. New Hampshire also acted in 1783 to gradually eliminate slavery like Pennsylvania. New York did the same in 1788.
By international standards, these truly were revolutionary polcies.
It was a divisive struggle to end slavery, nonetheless, and the fight was carried to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Amongst the delegates there, ending slavery was not universally accepted.
There were many in America that accepted slavery – most obviously the overwhelming majority of slaveholders. What they advocated certainly was within mainstream international norms. Legal slavery was the politically correct worldview and the conventional wisdom of the day held that slavery was a fact of life.
Given all that, it is a wonder that so many Americans opposed slavery in the 18thcentury. Slavery had been legal under British rule and if the rest of the world tolerated slavery then why did the United States have to be so exceptional?
Why didn’t the Americans just obey the rules? After all, every country of importance permitted slavery and shouldn’t the new United States follow suit?
The antislavery Americans fought back and ensured that no mention of slavery entered the Constitution. The war could not be won in 1788 but everyone on both sides knew that the fight against had just begun: The Constitution empowered each state to end slavery, and its amendment process opened the way to nationwide abolition.
Unique in the world, when the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the United States of America, almost alone in a giant slave-holding world, began the battle to end that great scourge on humanity. It met with success.
As many new states entered the union, they eschewed slavery. Ohio became a state in 1802 and its state constitution explicitly banned slavery in all its forms. Many others followed suit. There even was some success at the national level when Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. By 1860 most states (19 of 34) along with the backing of the large majority of America’s citizens had acted to end slavery.
When Abraham Lincoln of the abolitionist Republican Party was elected president in 1860, 11 of the 15 slave holding states went into open rebellion to protect slavery.
That ushered in the great and bloody Civil War (1861-1865) and during that conflict, on 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery finally was abolished across the United States.
Yes, the United States of America was not the first country in the world to end slavery. Japan ended the practice in by 1615. Mexico ended slavery in 1829, England (to include Canada) in 1834, Denmark in 1848 and the Netherlands in 1861.
But it is equally true that other countries lagged behind the United States. Portugal did not end slavery until 1878; Spanish Cuba did not act to end slavery until 1886 and Brazil, the country with the most slaves on the planet, held out until 1888. The Ottoman Empire officially ended slavery in 1890 but it took another decade to complete suppress its “legal” slavery and small-scale illegal slavery continued.
Thailand ended slavery in 1904, China only in 1910. It officially ended in Tanganyika and Namibia in 1919. And it is equally and importantly true that slavery still exists in both its ancient and modern forms in parts of the world today. It is a depressing and endlessly tragic history.
But in 1788 the United States of America, by adopting the Constitution, pushed against what the rest of world accepted as normal and fought the good fight – to form a more perfect union – from its inception. It continues to do so to this very day.
To use today’s international organizations as guideposts, you will find virtually every member state had institutionalized slavery in the late 17thcentury: The UN, the OAS, the EU, OPEC, the G4/G7/G what have you. The same for military alliances like NATO and its opposition counterpart, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Go back a couple of centuries and you will find a vast mosaic of slave nations everywhere.
There is no international ranking of nations who did the most to end slavery but the United States of America, by relentlessly pursuing the end of slavery starting in the late 1700s, certainly ranks at or near the very top – and the instrument that made it possible was the Constitution.
