The Constitution and slavery part 1

I'm Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute I'm here with Professor Joseph Ellis we've been talking about the Constitution and now we come to the really difficult part of the Constitution the problem they faced that was even worse than the ones between the big states and little States and that was the slave states end the non slave states a sectional crisis and Madison himself after the fact said the biggest source of division in the and the convention was not big states most states it was whether you were did or did not on slice and it's also not just a question of different states it is a huge moral question that they're wrestling with and then a practical and pragmatic question well I would you know those are all words that I would embrace but I would also say it's a it's an ideological issue and for them because they know that slavery is a violation of these principles on which the revolution is based and nobody including all the slave owners would disagree with that the problem is it's embedded right it's embedded in the constitutions of the body politics of all the states south of the Potomac and it's like a cancer and if you cut it out you kill the patient mm-hmm we're going to look for a moment at the Constitution and what it says about slavery because it doesn't even use the word slavery but before we do that let's talk about what some of the people said because some people did see it as a moral issue I think Luther Martin of Maryland right he did he was kind of drunk during most of the convention however so but he was correct in saying it was an odious bargain with sin inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonourable to the American character right and governor Morris had similar kinds of things that it was a curse on the body politic interestingly Hamilton was a founding member of the manumission Society of New York Hamilton never owned slaves Hamilton never said a thing about slavery during the convention because he understood the silence was all it was not something you could talk about it was like playing with dynamite or nitroglycerin it was the one issue that had the potential to blow up the entire convention and though they come up with that species of properly let's look here in the Constitution they never use the word slaves the work Lincoln said it was the most important thing about the Constitution that never used the word slavery he thought that meant that they were opposed to slavery didn't it meant that they couldn't talk about it without risking the entire republican experiment well let's look at the document what phrases do they use that species of property is the one they most frequently use and then they make a compromise on the number of people to be counted when you're doing votes three-fifths compromise yeah and they they don't really think that African Americans are three-fifths of a person they're not that stupid morally but it's a way to solve the political problem of how you count them in terms of XI representation but of course the African Americans even the ones who weren't slaves couldn't vote oh of course not no even the ones in that were North very seldom could vote and let's also make it clear that women and we couldn't vote okay new jersey makes some sort of weird mistake in its state constitution and for about five years women can vote there and then they fix that thing and eliminate but so it takes us really 200 years to become more and more of a democracy we're probably still on that arc of progress i would say that most people would say the gay rights issue is the next step let's look at what the constitution actually says or tries to say about how they're going to account for slaves in determining the population when we do elections well their language gets convoluted and it's because the idea they're trying to express it they don't want to say out loud or they've been clearly but they're trying to talk about representation and they talk about representatives and Direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included with is within this Union according to their respective numbers which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons including those bound to service for a term of years that's like indentured servants excluding Indians not taxed and I'll get this and three fifths of all other persons so that's a way of saying three fifths of the slave yes they don't want to use the word slavery yes and they don't even want to use the word blacks now what Lincoln's is they realize this was a document for the ages and they didn't want to have anything in it and they did eventually we were going to get rid of slavery they didn't want anything in this document that was going to prevent that from happening well we've got some stuff that's right there three-fifths and it doesn't take a genius to know what they're talking about but it does show in some ways a moral discomfort with compromise that's what it is I think that's what it really shows thank you