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Given that the Constitution was the handiwork of men who disagreed about slavery, it is hardly surprising that it could be—and was—read as both proslavery and antislavery." [10] Oakes' view is that, "depending on which clauses you cite and how you spin them, the Constitution can be read as either proslavery or antislavery". [11]
The U.S. Constitution does not use the term slavery but the existence of slavery in the United States did influence the compromises and agreements that were made within the document.
In 1777, the Vermont Republic, which was still unrecognized by the United States, passed a state constitution prohibiting slavery. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, led in part by Benjamin Franklin, was founded in 1775, and Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780. In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in Commonwealth v.
Douglass used the allegory of the "man from another country" during the speech, [7] arguing that abolitionists should take a moment to examine the plainly written text of the Constitution instead of secret meanings, saying, "It is not whether slavery existed ... at the time of the adoption of the Constitution" nor that "those slaveholders, in their hearts, intended to secure certain advantages ...
By 1804 (including New York (1799) and New Jersey (1804)), all of the Northern states had abolished slavery or set measures in place to gradually abolish it, [3] [5] although there were still hundreds of ex-slaves working without pay as indentured servants in Northern states as late as the 1840 census (see Slavery in the United States# ...
Following the creation of the United States in 1776 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, the legal status of slavery was generally a matter for individual U.S. state legislatures and judiciaries (outside of several historically significant exceptions including the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the 1808 Act Prohibiting ...
Hence, the eventual declaration in 1804 made several mentions of emancipation and freedom from the "cruelties of the French", rather than a de jure claim of independence. A similar attempt to attain independence was carried out on the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint Domingue rose in revolt and plunged the colony into civil war.
However, he eventually accepted it as a necessary compromise to get the South to ratify the constitution, later writing, "It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy."