Michael Histand

“The Constitution guaranteed a republican form of government to the states—but didn’t its protections for slavery undermine republican government as well? The security for the slave trade in Article I, Section 9, he wrote, went against what other states had already done to purify themselves of slavery’s corruption, and “is especially scandalous and inconsistant in a people, who have asserted their own liberty by the sword, and which dangerously enfeebles the districts, wherein the laborers are bondsmen. The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.” The Constitution partook of propaganda. The corollary: don’t trust men in the highest stations.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“States with slaves had more votes in the Congress than states without them, making the three-fifths clause reason enough to reject the document.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“To give more power to Southerners was to hand the federal government over to the least egalitarian people in the United States.13”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“It had been said, “It is not we doing it.” To the contrary, insisted these quintessential provincials, “We are the nation” who will have to defend slaveholders when “Africans rise up” and a foreign power intervenes on their side. Why wasn’t the prohibition of the slave trade by the Continental Congress in 1774 an ironclad precedent? “Can we suppose what was morally evil in the year 1774, has become in the year 1788, morally good?” Perhaps tired of reading about people like themselves as living proof of the need for better leadership, the dissenters turned their antifederalist antislavery into a blast against the founders themselves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification