Slavery In The Constitution Essay

As mentioned in the module, "Lecture Notes for Chapter 2 The Constitution", the Three-Fifths Compromise or "the three-fifths rule", was put into motion as a way to appease Northern delegates while also preventing the Southern delegates from leaving the convention. The compromise ultimately states, "The three-fifths meant that the House of Representatives and the electoral college would be apportioned in part of the basis of property--specifically, property in slaves" (Bardes, Shelley, Schmidt 42-43). In other words, this referred to slaves in that each one would be counted as three fifths of a person, which benefited slave owners the most as that meant they would have more people from the South when it came to determining the representation in Congress. which is how the interests of Southern states were addressed.

Through this slaves were counted as three-fifths of the population for both the representation in the House of Representatives and taxation as well. Every five slaves equaled three people counted for population and taxation. The north was pleased because the slave states were being taxed for their large population and the south states were

Never directly mentioned in the Constitution, and commonly refereed to as “others”, African Americans were often denied existence in the Constitutional Conventions. James Madison embodied the complacency of the average white American man. Ellis describes his thinking as “a kind of mysterious region where ideas entered going in one direction but then emerged headed the opposite way.” (114). The Southern founding fathers, Madison included, acknowledged the moral evils of the slave trade but many of them slave owners themselves, did not desire an end to it, admittedly for their own profit.

After completing the process of the Constitutional Convention, I have learned an exceptional amount of information that can be used to take on the real world. During the convention there were many factors that impacted how the convention was run, and what choices were made. The preliminary discussion topics, the lessons learned, and the factions represented in the convention all modified the ending result. Each of the preliminary discussions with other factions prior to the convention were very important to the final decisions made. Slavery, a very important topic during the convention, was one such example that branched out into other different issues including slave trade and the abolishment of slavery.

Finally, the Three-Fifths Clause was created. This stated that slaves would be considered three-fifths of a person for representation purposes regarding both the distribution of taxes, and the distribution of the members of the United States House of Representatives. These compromises helped the government receive a handle on slavery until it ended in

One of the compromises made in the Constitutional Convention is the three-fifths compromise. In this compromise, the southerners wanted to add slaves to the population of the state they lived in. If slaves were included in their state’s population, that state would be able to add more representatives in the House of Representatives. Northerners did not agree with that statement because slaves did not have the right to vote. After the delegates compromised, they agreed that only three-fifths of the slave’s population would be counted into the state’s population.

The Constitution denied freedom to slaves, and many of the Framers knew the moral inadequacy of doing so. The

The United States in the 1700 used slavery as a common way of generating a mass production of cotton which at the time was a prosperous commodity grown in the new world. The Northern states recognized that slavery was cruel and unjust. Even so, by the time of the American Revolution and eventual adoption of the new Constitution in 1787, slavery was actually a dying institution. As part of the compromises that allowed the Constitution to be written and adopted, the founders agreed to end the importation of slaves into the United States by

Despite the fact that the Constitution did not employ the term “slavery”, Article IV provided for the return of persons who escaped from their masters “held to service or labor” such as fugitive slaves. After 20 years of the confirmation of the Constitution in 1808, Article I provided the end of the slave trade. Many questions were left non responsed by the Constitution, especially, about the statue of slavery in the new territories obtained by the United States. (ibid) The failure to treat the comprehension and the honesty with slavery in the Constitution guaranteed a conflict over this issue and was particularly one of the leading motivations for war and those reasons were demonstrated in the quotation of the American Civil

Ultimately, the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery because there wasn 't anything in it that was overly anti-slavery; slavery was being supported. I think that it makes sense to have the Constitution be pro-slavery because the country was left in a chaotic state after the Articles of Confederation failed and it needed to become united fast. To quickly unite the country, the Constitution needed everyone’s support and help, which couldn 't have been received without slavery. The large slave states wouldn 't have ratified the Constitution if slavery was going to be abolished

The amendment states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude will exist any longer EXCEPT as a punishment for crime. If the source of the South’s incredibly profitable free-labor based economy was demolished with the enacting of this amendment, then something had to come its place, right? Right. The mass incarceration of African Americans.

late 1850s, many abolitionists took it a step further, and began to attack not just slavery’s conditions, but also because it enforced dependence upon slaves. Security was the most important consideration of slave ownership because slaves represented something that was highly valuable but still a risky asset. American abolitionists also began to look at the U.S. Constitution. They agreed that the framers contended with the snake of slavery that was coiled under the table at the constitution convention by writing into the United States Constitution implicit protection of the peculiar institution (Knowles, 2007). Some abolitionists were concerned about whether or not the Constitution was a pro slavery document.

Danielle Allen writes about her love for the ‘flawed genius’ of the Constitution. Flawed, because the Constitution is inherently pro-slavery and racist document due to compromises such as the Three-Fifths Compromise. The Three-Fifths Compromises essentially wrote that enslaved persons would count as ‘three-fifths of a person’ for the purpose of counting for the population. This gave the Slave South a disproportionally larger amount of representation in the House of Representations, which basis representation on population size. At its foundation, the Constitution did not recognize Black people as full humans, as justification to help preserve the fragile Union from dismantling before it even began.

Are “all men created equal”? Why did the Constitution allow slavery to continue? The framers of the Constitution allowed slavery to continue because of political, economic, and social issues. They wanted their nation to be unified and the number of states to stay intact. They wanted to secure wealth and slavery was a great part of their economy.

In the minds of many Southerners, without slavery, the South and America as a whole, wouldn’t continue to be a growing economic powerhouse, and would lose its culture as a nation where White Christian, males, ruled society. For many, there was no South, no America, without slavery. History has shown time and time again that power corrupts. To hold onto their power, slave owners made sure their slaves were kept uneducated.