[jeffersondem]

“Clearly our Founders well understood that slavery was a stain on their own ideals and should rather soon be put on a path to abolition.”

But first they would enshrine slavery into the United States Constitution. But not until Article I.

However, of the original 13 slave states, only 13 of them would vote to include slavery in the United States Constitution.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "However, of the original 13 slave states, only 13 of them would vote to include slavery in the United States Constitution."

Well... of the original 13 colonies, by 1787 five states plus Vermont and five more in the Northwest Territories had already begun abolition.

In addition, Southern leaders like Washington, Jefferson & Madison had expressed their opposition to slavery, long term, and Southern states like Maryland & North Carolina allowed freed-blacks to vote.

So there was reason to hope in 1787 that slavery was already on a long-term path to extinction in the United States, regardless of protections provided for it in the new Constitution.

Even as late as the Virginia debates on abolition in 1832, the Richmond Enquirer could still call slavery:

"Are we forever to suffer the greatest evil, which can scourge our land, not only to remain, but to increase in its dimensions?"

Nobody then imagined that by 1860 to question slavery would be verboten throughout the South.