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In his 1860 speech "The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?", Frederick Douglass cites the Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 left behind by James Madison in order to describe four provisions of the Constitution that are said to be pro-slavery. In examining the history of how the clauses were ...
A collection of the most important American proslavery articles is The Pro-slavery argument: as maintained by the most distinguished writers of the southern states: Containing the several essays on the subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew (1853).
Over time, Douglass had a well-publicized break with Garrisonian principles and announced [2] his change of opinion in the North Star with respect to the Constitution as "a pro-slavery document." A decade later, Douglass was accused of having supported John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry , which prompted him to flee the country.
The 1787 Constitutional Convention debated slavery, and for a time slavery was a major impediment to passage of the new constitution. As a compromise, slavery was acknowledged but never mentioned explicitly in the Constitution. The Fugitive Slave Clause, Article 4, section 2, clause 3, for example, refers to a "Person held to Service or Labor."
The denial was acutely felt in California, which prohibited slavery when it joined the U.S. in 1850 but also supported the rights of pro-slavery white Southerners and looked the other way as ...
Pro-slavery intellectuals and slaveholders began to rationalize slavery as a positive good that benefited both owners and the enslaved. Calhoun believed that the "ownership of Negros" was both a right and an obligation, causing the pro-slavery intelligentsia to position enslavement as a paternalistic and socially beneficial relationship, that ...
Although the Corwin Amendment does not explicitly use the word slavery, it was designed specifically to protect slavery from federal power. The outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed the Corwin Amendment on March 2, 1861, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War , with the intent of preventing that war and preserving the Union.
The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was the first protest against enslavement of Africans made by a religious body in the Thirteen Colonies. Francis Daniel Pastorius authored the petition; he and the three other Quakers living in Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia), Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff, signed it on behalf of the ...