The Patriot Post® · Rebutting Revisionist History on Slavery

Given all the hoopla lately surrounding slavery — The New York Times’s race-baiting 1619 Project comes to mind — it’s worth noting when the Constitution itself is dragged through the mud.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote a book last year titled No Property in Man. While Wilentz concedes that “the Constitution’s proslavery features … were substantial,” he also argues that the document laid the foundation for the eventual abolition of slavery. One of his former students, Nicholas Guyatt, isn’t buying it. He takes Wilentz to task for “a narrow understanding of antislavery politics” while also being more interested in “politics rather than history.”

National Review’s John Hirschauer explains why Guyatt is way off base:

This, and other critical reviews like it, give short shrift to Wilentz’s treatment of the fraught relationship between slavery and the Constitution. His is a balanced case: While he resists the impulse to exonerate the Founders, who granted key concessions to pro-slavery southern delegates that fortified the practice of chattel slavery, he likewise rejects Garrison and his modern exponents who would deem the Constitution exclusively pro-slavery. By refusing to codify the notion of “property in man” in the Constitution, Wilentz argues, the Framers left open the possibility that a future Congress would abolish the practice outright, though they themselves had neither the votes nor the fortitude to do. …

Wilentz rejects the view that the Founders were “clairvoyant,” somehow predicting that less than 100 years hence [Abraham] Lincoln and [Frederick] Douglass would invoke the founding documents to support abolitionist causes. Instead, he describes the real tension present at the convention, between a coterie of southern delegates pushing for the explicit codification of chattel slavery on one hand and voices of abolition such as the delegates William Livingston and Rufus King on the other, with a range of men somewhere in the middle harboring various degrees of ambivalence about the moral and political prospects of a nation that would one day be half-slave and half-free. Wilentz thus insists that the Constitution is neither pro-slavery nor anti-slavery in full; it is both, at the same time, imbued with the impressive tradition of abolition that preceded and continued through the founding epoch, but necessarily tainted by the compromises made with the pro-slavery forces in the South. This, he says, is the heart of the matter: that the Constitution provided a clear path for the forces of abolition to prevail, that the best tradition of constitutional interpretation is the one held by Douglass and Lincoln, and that, for all its flaws, our Constitution has allowed us to keep working toward a more perfect union.

It’s true that flawed men crafted a flawed document, but never in the history of mankind has the arc been bent so far toward Liberty and away from tyranny. Leftists despise that Liberty, and that’s why they trot out continued phony attacks meant to delegitimize the Founders and the documents they endeavored to create.