Part II
The Threat
**
THE PEOPLE
The arrangement addressed by the proposed Constitution and dissected by Hamilton amounted to a government of the States, by the States, and for the States. Thirteen sovereign States established it by agreement amongst themselves. Their legislatures appointed the delegates to the Congress. The business of the government included little else than matters of “general interest” to the States. Any five States could veto legislation. Enforcement relied on voluntary compliance. The States in theory ceded a sliver of their sovereign rights to the joint venture of national government, but in fact they ceded none.
The first item on the list of things to be accomplished, the number one priority necessary to have a shot at the other goals that follow was “to form a more perfect Union.” The Constitution proposed that people[6] were the proper object of government, and therefore the union of the people would be a more perfect union. “We the People of the United States of America” would establish the government, run the government (through representatives from amongst ourselves), and benefit from the government. The Union, in other words, would be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Union was patently impossible to achieve if it required States to abdicate their sovereignty. To the advocates for strong national government, without union nothing further was possible. To at least five States, the engine of their economic system, slavery, was not negotiable. Compromise was the only path forward.
One school of criticism of this country and its Constitution emphasizes the foundational sin of slavery. That the United States of America partly was built on the backs of black slaves and the institutionalized political economy of slavery is irrefutable fact. That fact has indeed corrupted and distorted the very premise and promise of all those noble words about freedom and equality.
Bear with me while I argue not to deny the vileness of slavery or its on-going impacts. Bear with me while I describe a more enduringly positive interpretation of the Constitution that may clear a pathway through the jungled tangle grown over our divided house, our neglected gardens, our shared, inherited estate, and reveal once more that shining hill from which at last to gaze upon the River and the green Promised Land beyond.
§ Slavery and the Founding of USAmerica
Slavery existed when the United States of America was proclaimed, had existed for 157[7] years. The slave trade was developed and operated by the British and other Europeans, principally to work the lands in and around the Caribbean. Like child labor in the 19th century, slavery was a commercial undertaking rather than a moral issue. After all, slavery had been a historical fact for thousands of years. To those who “understood the world,” it was an efficient, cost-effective means to an end, to a public benefit no less. To those who did raise moral objections, the commercemen easily answered numerous and various justifications of the Lord, of Nature, of human history, which satisfied themselves at least.
When the first United States government formed, the thirteen former British colonies, now self-proclaimed sovereign States, confederated without a word about slavery. They had a war to prosecute, after all, before they could address other matters. Already by this time slavery weighed variously on the moral scale from repugnant to troubling to ordained by God. Undoubtedly, many not directly involved little considered the issue. In the southern States the institution was ferociously embraced by all who had benefitted over the decades or, at the least, simply accepted by others as a way of life.
Such profound differences of interest and opinion as these on this one topic testify to the great difficulty, the vast complexity of the project confronting those remarkable statesmen of the Constitutional Convention, a project to settle the question, “whether societies of men really are capable or not of establishing good government upon reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident or force.” [Hamilton, TFP #1] “Good government,” here in this “new land” where slavery had long existed, was based on the vital principles of equality and republican form. [Madison, TFP #37]
Equality and slavery do not really fit together. These men were not idiots bandying words about without understanding. They knew, some by direct experience as “masters,” some by observation, that few concepts stand in greater opposition. But one there was: “[N]othing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution or a dismemberment of the Union. It will therefore be of use to begin by examining the advantages of that Union, the certain evils, and the probable dangers, to which every State will be exposed from its dissolution.” [Hamilton, #1]
The United States of America were very weakly mortared. Joined primarily in revolt from Britain, they lacked post-war powers to bring “efficiency and energy” to matters of common interest for all the States, matters of revenue and debt, interstate commerce, security from foreign and other threats. Fully 16% of “The Federalist Papers,” the first 14 essays, are devoted to the topic of Union before even beginning to look at the specific merits of the proposed plan. Clearly, Union was paramount.
The Framers, therefore, had the complex challenge of devising a Constitution agreeable to as many of the delegates as possible in order even to achieve a document which they could present to Congress. As Hamilton phrased it, the topic of “our deliberations affect[ed] too many particular interests, innovate[d] upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.” [TFP #1] Madison, after the document was achieved, invited the conclusion “that all the deputations composing the convention were satisfactorily accommodated by the final act, or were induced to accede to it by a deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing private opinions and partial interests to the public good, and by a despair of seeing this necessity diminished by delays or by new experiments.” [#37] In some instances statesmanship rose above local or private interests; in some instances compromise was required
Certain it was that the southern States never would cede their claim to the economic institution of slavery on which they so long had depended. Those deputations “were satisfactorily accommodated,” but they had to give something in return. Not only had the southern delegates insisted that slavery remain an issue of State jurisdiction; they also wanted to use the existence of the enslaved human beings to “juke the stats,” as we learned that phrase from “The Wire.” By including them as population, they intended to increase the number of their Representatives to be allotted to the House. The compromise capped the count at 60% to check an unwarranted numerical power of the region in the House. No one meant by the language in the Constitution of “three-fifths,” that slaves were only three-fifths human. Inasmuch as southerners regarded them as chattel property, the slaves should not have been counted at all. No southern Representative intended to represent in Congress the interests of any slave. It was a power grab.
Furthermore, the southern delegates gave up the slave trade itself. “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” was allowed to continue for 20 years, after which it could be (and was) prohibited by Congress. [Article I, sect. 9] Finally, as Madison put it in #38, “Is the importation of slaves permitted by the new Constitution for twenty years? By the old it is permitted forever.” Without the union of all thirteen States under the Constitution, with all its defects, the southern States, either as a regional confederacy or as individual sovereignties, would have never ended slavery or the trade in slaves.
The Long Clasp 