[Pelham]

Jason Ross is an Associate Professor at Liberty University. He is currently at work (with Gordon Lloyd) on Slavery and the Well Constructed Union: Use, Misuse, and Neglect of “The Madison Papers”.

[Pelham]

” New Left historian Staughton Lynd read causation into this coincidence, claiming that Garrison and his followers seized on James Madison’s “Notes” “to show in detail what they had long suspected: that the revered Constitution was a sordid sectional compromise, in Garrison’s words ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.’”

[cdcdawg]

‘Historians today speak of the “proslavery Constitution” and “antislavery constitutionalism”; they almost never speak of the “antislavery Constitution” or of “proslavery constitutionalism.”’

Good grief. Can’t they do something more useful, like debate how many angels can dance on the head of pin? I guess these academic debates still mean something, but it’s still trying to have an honest discussion with a dishonest person.

[MosesKnows]

The Legend of the Proslavery Constitution

It is called The Constitution.

It is always the Constitution.
Add ten amendments and it still the Constitution.
Add seventeenth more amendments and it is still the Constitution.

At any given time there is only One Constitution.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Whether it was or not, I’d still like to emphasize a principle about all this alleged BLM complaints about our American society:

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You got rid of legal discrimination, don’t condemn the rest of it as even well past, this country has been pretty damn good.

[Bull Snipe]

this ought to bring JeffersonDem out

[Verginius Rufus]

Of the 13 states as of 1787, 6 were states where slavery was sufficiently important that they would not have ratified a document designed to eliminate slavery. So if the Constitutional Convention had produced an anti-slavery document, it would have been ratified by at most 7 states, perhaps fewer.

The drafters of the Constitution avoided using the words "slave" or "slavery" in the text--they first appeared in the Constitution with the Reconstruction Era amendments.

[Ohioan]

What the Constitution surely was not, was an effort to force one State or States' morality on any other State. It ws framed in a spirit of mutual respect--just as our foreign policy was formulated to encourage reciprocal respect.

The concept offered is not difficult to fathom. We did not embrace the union to force our interpretations of morality on others; rather to protect the common interests of the peoples involved--a very different idea than forcing uniformity of thought.