History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2402 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Constitution and Slavery
The idea
The claim that the Constitution settled slavery is the first thing this capstone takes apart. The document of seventeen eighty-seven did three things about slavery and none of them was a settlement. It counted three-fifths of enslaved people toward representation, which gave slaveholding states more seats in the House and more electoral votes than their voting populations warranted. It barred Congress from ending the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years, until eighteen oh eight. And it required that people escaping slavery be returned, which made every free state an instrument of the institution. The word slavery appears nowhere in the text. The framers used persons held to service and other circumlocutions, which is itself evidence that they knew what they were writing. Unit 07 entry 0928 covers the compromises and Unit 12 entry 1663 covers what happened when the trade clause expired. Every one of those provisions is a postponement rather than a resolution.
In practice
A founding document that arranges the terms on which slavery will continue, and declines to name it, in a country that will fight a war over it in seventy-four years.
Where people slip
Hold the twin exactly. The Constitution did not settle slavery and it did not intend to. It postponed every question it touched, and postponement has a direction. The three-fifths clause gave the slaveholding states a standing advantage in Congress and in presidential elections that lasted until the Fourteenth Amendment removed it, which Unit 16 entry 2271 covers. That advantage is why the Missouri Compromise mattered, why the admission of every territory mattered, and why the arithmetic at Unit 14 entry 2012 finally broke the arrangement. A student who believes the founders solved the problem cannot explain why the next seventy years consist of nothing but the problem.
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