Dennis Ashendorf

“The antislavery Vermont Republican Charles Rich delivered a full refutation of the slaveholders, and with it a summation of an emerging antislavery constitutionalism.104 Although it pained him to oppose his longtime southern Republican allies, Rich said, he found it impossible to square the first principles of either the Declaration of Independence or the preamble of the Constitution with slavery. Although slavery existed at the nation’s founding, this misfortune hardly necessitated slavery’s continued existence. “By what charter of a national character,” he asked, “[has] a right to hold a human being in slavery … ever been recognised?” The absence of the word “slavery” in the Constitution signaled that, although “for obvious reasons, [the framers] were obliged indirectly to admit the fact of its existence, they purposely, and very carefully, avoided the use of any expressions from which, by fair construction, even an argument could be derived in favor of its legitimacy.” Any justification for slavery would have to be derived “by a reference to the laws of nature and natural rights, and not to the Constitution.” As slavery was strictly an unfortunate local institution, Rich asserted, Americans had an obligation, in accord with the laws of nature and natural rights, to prevent its extension, The Missouri question presented to the nation an irrevocable choice: Hitherto, slavery has not been so recognized by the General Government, as to cause our national character to be materially affected by it; for, although there are States in the Union which, from the necessity of the case, may be termed slave-holding States, it cannot, with truth, be alleged that, as a nation, we have permitted slavery. But if, under present circumstances, Congress shall solemnly decide that it cannot restrain the unlimited extension of it, and that a want of power to do so results from an unqualified recognition of it by the Constitution, our national character will become identified with it; and instead of its being, as heretofore, a local malady, and susceptible of cure, it must henceforth be regarded as affecting the whole system, and past the hope or possibility of a remedy. Rich bade his colleagues and countrymen to join in limiting “an evil which cannot at present be removed” or “diminished by dispersion”—hemming it in and keeping it a local institution “till removed, and our national character thereby preserved.”105”
― Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface