You may have a point about slaveowner Benjamin Franklin but I don't think slaveowner Charles Pinckney would have shied away from acknowledging slavery existed.
Thomas Jefferson in his notes supports your notion. In writing about the long philippic removed from the DOI he says: “The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
There is that disgraceful northern hypocrisy you referenced.
Northern states owned relatively few slaves; they made their fortunes building and outfitting ships for the slave-catching expeditions; also by insuring slave cargoes; also by financing the slave-catching expeditions; and also by buying and shipping slave-grown cotton at a price allowing them to make profits. Also the northern states manufactured and sold goods from slave-grown cotton; more profits. Northern states also had Congress impose high import tariffs on European goods purchased from proceeds of slave-grown cotton; more money that Congress could direct to Northern interests.
I agree with what you wrote: “The important point here is that our (northern) Founders went to great lengths to not just avoid words like “slave”, they also tried to obscure slave references under language a casual reader might well not even understand.”
So, yes, northern Founders had guilty consciences and for million$ of reasons.
Now that you, Thomas Jefferson, and I all agree, I can't help but wonder if you will next repudiate your own words which acknowledge the north's long, evil, and disgraceful role in building the slave business?
One thing you could point out: by 1847 Pennsylvania had completely ended slavery in that state. By that time all their slaves had died or been sold down the river.
:)
We're not talking about whether slavery existed, but rather about the question: why didn't our Founders use words like "slave" in their 1787 Constitution?
Why did they replace "slave" with euphemisms or indirect language?
The obvious answer is, our Founders well understood that slavery was both wrong and disgraceful, and so could not be called by its real name in their most polite of documents, the 1787 US Constitution.
As for Charles Pinckney, he was directly involved in the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause, and so obviously participated in obscuring direct references to slaves, which are there called a "Person held to service or labor".
So, it looks to me like even SC's Charles Pinckney understood the 1787 American squeamishness about words like "slave", "slavery" or "enslaved".
A squeamishness which was totally abandoned in the South by 1860.
The common phrase was "selling South". Pennsylvania IIRC set the maximum age for a slave born after a certain date at 27. That left the owner 27 years to sell his slave to an owner in a state that would allow that person to be enslaved for life. This had 2 benefits as far as Pennsylvania was concerned.
1) it fully compensated Pennsylvania slave owners for their property. They would get market value for all of their slaves. Thus they were not nearly as opposed as they would have been had their slave property simply been expropriated (emancipated).
2) It got rid of Black People. It got them out of state. Oh, I know that's a horrible, nasty, wicked and rude thing to say. Unfortunately, its also true. This was very much a concern of Northerners. They didn't just want to get rid of slavery. They wanted to get rid of Black People. That's why they passed the Black Codes - to make it extremely difficult for Free Blacks to live so as to drive them out too.
Were those really “slave-catching” expeditions? Serious question. I always thought they purchased slaves from African slave markets.