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Slavery
Slavery—legal ownership of another human being as property—has until fairly recently been accepted in many cultures, and even today it continues in some forms. The practice existed in ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy, and in ancient Rome during the days of the republic and the empire. In fact, the word liberty is derived from the Latin libertas, which refers to the status of a freed slave (see Liberty).
In his draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776), Thomas Jefferson, a slave holder himself, accused George III of England of “violating [the] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere….” This language, however, was stricken from the draft at the insistence of the delegates to the Continental Congress from Rhode Island and South Carolina.
Constitutional Compromise
In 1787 the Framers of the Constitution, in order to maintain the union of all thirteen states, compromised on the question of continuing slavery. The language of the Constitution that indirectly reflected this position appears in Article I, section 2: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound in Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons [slaves].”
In essay 54 of The Federalist (1787–88) (see Federalist Papers), James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” explained the basis for the framers’ view of the inequality of slaves: “The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criterion; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the Negroes into subjects of property that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the Negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.”
This passage is particularly ambiguous. Madison seems to admit that there is no bar to slaves’ becoming citizens of the United States like anyone else, except for the laws that make them slaves. They are human beings like the framers, except that certain laws allow them to be treated otherwise.The correctness of those laws, however, is not questioned, and Madison’s only intent is to explain why slaves are not counted fully for the purposes of apportionment (see Reapportionment) and taxation. Clearly the debate over slavery had been settled in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and those like Madison who were desperately seeking to have a union of all thirteen states could not rehash this issue before the document’s ratification.
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