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The Constitution certainly did not enshrine slavery. There is no clause anywhere in the Constitution explicitly protecting the practice.

Time to wake you up. Article IV, Section 2 is specifically about protecting slavery. If you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe the guy at this link.

But I must gently disagree with you in that, as I see it, the Constitution legitimized slavery by allowing slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person . True, the word “slave” is not mentioned. But the phrase “all other people” can only refer to slaves, and was it meant to refer to slaves.

A lot of people don't understand this. They think the 3/5ths was because the slave owners considered them lesser persons, but the truth is the 3/5ths was insisted upon by the Free states, not the slave states. The slave state representatives wanted to count them as a full person, and the free states thought that would give too much representation to the slave states, and therefore didn't want them counted at all.

The free states compromised by allowing the slave states to count them as 3/5ths, not the other way around.

Good point.

What seems to get lost in most of our posts is the point that the Constitution didn’t discuss slavery, because at the time it didn’t need to.

Doing so would have prevented ratification of the Constitution. It was more sensible to discuss and enshrine the concept of property rights. Slaves were not legally citizens, they were property.

When religiously driven abolitionists, like my family, chose their faith over the rule of law, the resistance and eventual fighting over slavery began.

Defining what is property, and how to treat property, is the real core of this debate. Every result issues from that core.

That core issue, though, only became real to many in the North when slaves and slave catchers came north.

That’s when many Northerners, abolitionists or not, realized that there would eventually be war between the states.

The only issues that remain is a sentimental sympathy for the property losses and destruction of the South, and a continuing strain of white supremacy in both the North and the South.

Distorting the truth as always I see.

The slave state representatives wanted to count them as a full person, and the free states thought that would give too much representation to the slave states, and therefore didn't want them counted at all.

The free states recognized that the Slavocracy wanted to count their chattel property in full for purposes of aggregating power but had no intention of ever actually allowing them any representation. Why count them at all if the reason is representation that they could never benefit?

Oh, and neo-confederates also conveniently neglect to mention that the original reason for the census was for purpose of apportioning tax liabilities. At that time the Slavocracy didn't want their chattel property counted at all.

Leaning Right: "The Constitution certainly did not enshrine slavery.
There is no clause anywhere in the Constitution explicitly protecting the practice."

DiogenesLamp: "Time to wake you up.
Article IV, Section 2 is specifically about protecting slavery."

Yet again, the issue here is that word, "enshrined".
So far as I know it was first introduced by jeffersondem many threads ago, and today continues to appear long after jeffersondem himself has apparently come to eschew it.
And the reason is obvious: there's no "enshrining" of slavery in the Constitution, as in: to hold in reverence or even worship.
"Enshrining" is reserved for such phrases as,

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are Created equal, ...endowed by their Creator..."

That's "enshrined", slavery was never "enshrined" it was never even explicitly mentioned, rather it was snuck in the back door under false pretenses, like a man bringing his mistress home for a dalliance, hoping nobody would notice.

They noticed.