If Founders believed in the Founding Principles,
then they knew in their heart that slavery was the epitome of oppression. Slavery
denied other humans the exercise of their liberty, which the Founders understood
to be precious. Yet it was a slaveholder who wrote, “All men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Slavery is a difficult issue in our nation’s
history. The Founders, especially the Constitutional Framers, have received censure for not
taking greater action against slavery. Some of the more prominent Founders are denigrated
because they owned slaves. How can the Founders comments be reconciled with their
actions? The answer is not simple.
Slavery at the Founding
At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery was illegal only in Massachusetts; more than two hundred slave
ships regularly sailed out of New England; and over half of the wealth in the South
comprised slaves. Both England and the North held a large amount of loans collateralized
by slaves. In 1787, slavery was widespread, and a major element of the economy in
both the South and the North.
Despite the position of slavery in 1787, many
of the Founders believed slavery was already on
its way to extinction. The slave trade had been made illegal in ten of the thirteen
states. All thirteen states were seeing an increase in free blacks, especially in
the North and the frontier areas of the South. Between 1775 and 1800, the number
of free blacks in the nation increased from fourteen thousand to one hundred thousand.
Virginia had passed legislation that freed slaves who served in the army or navy.
In 1780, Quakers in Pennsylvania pressured the state legislature to pass a law declaring
all children of slaves free. With the importation of additional slaves prohibited
in most of the country, declining slave labor economics, and growing pressure to
declare the newborn of slaves free, most of the Founders didn’t want to jeopardize
the union over an institution that was already dying. For this reason, even staunch
abolitionists like Benjamin Franklin only made peripheral swipes at slavery
during the Constitutional Convention.