Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification Paperback – June 22, 2010

This book was a little slow to start and I kept falling alseep while reading it. Once i got to the middle, it picked up and I learned a few things that school didn't teach.

Decent read. Makes a strong argument about how integral the role of slavery was to the revolutionary period and the creation of the constitution.

I purchased this for my sons history class, but it looks so interesting that I cannot wait to read it!

Great for College Course as Requested! especially price for a freshman in college!

Concisely and beautifully written exposition of the ways slavery was woven into the Constitution.

A concise and mildly polemical book discussing the role of the Constitution as a shield for slavery in the early American republic. Waldstreicher's point of departure is historiographic in that he points out that discussions of the role of slavery figure very little in several of the standard discussions of the American revolution and the formation of the Constitution such as Bernard Bailyn's great Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood's magisterial The Creation of the American Republic. Waldstreicher makes a good argument that the Constitution was partly constructed to protect chattel slavery, a charge made in the early to mid-19th century by prominent abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison.Waldstreicher opens with useful discussion of the role of slavery in the outbreak and events of the Revolution. The most salient fact is the great role of slavery in the colonial economy, which was crucial not only to the Southern states but also to several of the Northern states. He highlights the importance of the famous Somersett decision that destroyed the concept that chattel slavery in the British Empire enjoyed fundamental constitutional protection. He discusses also the British efforts to recruit slaves as soldiers during the Revolution and the great anxiety engendered among slaveholders by the relatively successful British efforts. There is also an interesting discussion of the rhetorical use of slavery in the debates about colonial relations with Britain. Given the importance of defending slavery to many of the major actors in the Revolution, the continued importance of slavery in the American economy, and the fact that the Revolution was about taxation, representation, and conceptions of property rights, it was inevitable that the status of the institution of slavery would be an important issue at the Constitutional convention.Waldstreicher has a nice discussion of how slavery was an issue at the Constitutional convention and its role in the "Great Compromises" of the constitutional settlement. There can be little doubt that a number of features of the constitutional settlement protected slavery, even though the Founders made efforts to conceal the pro-slavery aspects of the Consitution. He follows with a useful discussion of how slavery featured in ratification and the interesting and inconsistent manuevers of the Federalists to obscure aspects of the relationship of slavery to the constitutional settlement. The final outcome was the stronger national government sought by the Federalsts but one in which the national government was constrained from exercising its power over the Peculiar Institution.Could it have been otherwise? Given the central role of slavery in the nascent American economy and the dominance of slaveholders in Southern states, its hard to avoid the conclusion that some compromise of this sort was necessary. The acquiesence in the constitutional settlement of anti-slavery figures such as Hamilton, Franklin, and even Washington strongly suggests how difficult it would have been to achieve a more neutral constitutional arrangement. To some extent, the anti-slavery advocates were betting on a gradual erosion of slavery in coming decades. This wasn't irrational as anti-slavery measures were advancing in Northern states and the profitability of plantation slavery appeared threatened in Virginia.Waldstreicher's arguments are solid and provide a useful corrective to fulsome characterizations of the Founders as prescient demi-gods rather than the highly pragmatic politicians they were (and needed to be). On the other hand, I suspect some of his argument isn't entirely fair. I think its generally recognized that the constitutional settlement was a relatively conservative act. He is critical of Bailyn's argument about the "Contagion of Liberty" that followed the Revolution and boosted the anti-slavery movement as ignoring the concern of the Founders with protecting slavery. My recollection is that Bailyn sees the "Contagion" as partly an ironic consequence of the Revolution, which would be consistent with Waldstreicher's own arguments. The republicanism of many of the Founders had a strongly elitist dimension and slavery as a pillar of the leisured life required for virtuous leadership was an easy rationalization of the institution of slavery. Finally, the anti-slavery Founders based their decisions partly on a relatively pessimistic view of the future of plantation economies. No one could have anticipated the enormous boost to slavery that resulted from the industrialization of textle production that occurred in Britain in the first half of the 19th century.Readers interested in a more detailed and very interesting exploration of this topic should pick up George Van Cleve's book. Van Cleve reaches many of the same conclusions as Waldstreicher (and William Lloyd Garrison).

This book is a welcome addition to my bookshelves, as it helps document the reasons the framers gave us a Constitutional oligarchy rather than a democracy or a republic, and why they lied about it.Two of the many people you can't trust in this world are slaveholders and politicians, and many of the framers were both.Recently, a democratic candidate for Congress asked me why I seem (in his opinion) to make a religion of democracy. He, of course, like the framers, believes that there are more important things, such as property rights, business interests, and power. So what if Americans don't have a real voice in government, as long as their betters have the power to make their decisions for them?Although this country's founders used the right and duty to establish a democratic form of government as justification for their revolution from England, the first thing the framers did was betray that right and trample on that duty.So here we are in 2010, having "exported democracy" by totally destroying one of the oldest civilizations on earth (Iraq), and continuing our wars of aggression (crimes against humanity) and crony bailouts in the name of and with the consent of citizens of whom a majority oppose both policies, but who do not yet realize that their vote is NOT a voice in government, but just the consent of the governed to allow unaccountable representatives to do whatever they wish.A recent Rasmussen Report [...] poll showed that only 21% of Americans believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed. But they don't need your consent, your vote is sufficient, and most people will ignore war crimes and fiscal treachery in order to vote for or against the selfish hot-button issues that political operatives use to draw people to the polls.Slavery, of course, remains intact in the U.S. to this very day. Rather than being abolished by the 13th Amendment, it was established as legal punishment for a crime, and it was the oligarchy who would decide what was and wasn't a crime and who would and wouldn't be charged with and punished for it.David Waldstreicher's research takes the ordinary citizen inside the secret meetings where the Constitution was drawn up and makes the intent of the framers visible. Their intent was never to establish a democracy or a republic, but to consolidate power and to perpetuate inequality. In this they succeeded.