Constitution & Slavery
Investigative Questions: Was the Constitution Pro or Anti-Slavery as it was written in 1787? Is it a racist document?
Directions: Over the next two days, you will review the words from the Constitution related to slavery then outline the arguments of two historians with opposing viewpoints in relation to the IQs above. You will then decide which argument you find more persuasive and construct your own argument to answer the IQs above. You will post this argument on your own Historical Thinking blog that we will create next week in class.
Step 1 - PRIMARY SOURCE EVIDENCE |
Primary Source Text: The United States Constitution
Use history notebook and last’s week’s Constitutional Convention Investigation to complete.
S - Source | O - Occasion | A - Audience | P - Purpose |
Translate the Constitution.
Direct Quotation from the Constitution | What it Means (the gist - complete the highlighted portion) | Word used instead of slave to mean slave (highlight in text and write below - first row completed for you) |
Article 1, Section 2 Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. | The number of representatives a state has will be determined by its population. Free people will be counted as ______ persons. Indians are not counted. All other people will be counted as ______ of a person.
| all other persons. |
Direct Quotation from the Constitution | What it Means (the gist - complete the highlighted portion) | Word used instead of slave to mean slave (highlight in text and write below - first row completed for you) |
Article 1, Section 9 The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person. | The ____________ ____________ can remain legal where it currently is legal, but will end in all the states in ____________. | |
Article 4, Section 2 No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. | If an enslaved person, who is enslaved in a state where ____________ is allowed, escapes to a state where slavery is not allowed to be free they will be required by law to ____________ to their owner. This is also known as the ____________ slave clause. |
Should slavery be legal in any of the United States? | |||
Class Decision in 2015 | Decision in 1789 | Change that has been made to the Constitution since 1789 | Citation (where found in Constitution) |
Should the slave trade continue to be allowed? | |||
Class Decision in 2015 | Decision in 1789 | Change that has been made to the Constitution since 1789 | Citation (where found in Constitution) |
Should escaped slaves be returned to their owners? | |||
Class Decision in 2015 | Decision in 1789 | Change that has been made to the Constitution since 1789 | Citation (where found in Constitution) |
Who should be allowed to vote in elections? | |||
Class Decision in 2015 | Decision in 1789 | ||
The Constitution says nothing about who shall vote, therefore who could vote was left up to individual states. At the time, no states allowed women or enslaved people to vote; many states had laws requiring individuals to own a certain amount of property before they could vote. | |||
CONTINUE TO NEXT PAGE FOR NEXT STEP
Step 2 - READING AND ANNOTATING OPPOSING HISTORIAN’S INTERPRETATIONS |
Background: On September 14th, 2015, Bernie Sanders, a current American candidate for president of the United States, declared the following in a speech he gave at Liberty University: “[The United States] “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.” The next day, on September 15th, an historian from Princeton University named Sean Wilentz wrote an op-ed (see comment) that challenged Bernie Sanders’ claim. Beginning today, you will read Sean Wilentz’s article and outline his argument then read an article published by another historian who disagrees with Wilentz and agrees with Bernie Sanders. You will then write your own argument (op-ed) on your own blog next week.
Historian Argument #1: Excerpt from “Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution” written by Sean Wilentz, Professor of History at Princeton University, published in the NY Times on September 16, 2015.[1]
S - Source | O - Occasion | A - Audience | P - Purpose |
Step 1 - Read the secondary source historical argument below once to yourself, including any annotations I made as comments below.
Step 2 - Define any unknown words using the right click (two finger tap) define feature and write the definition as a comment. Need to define at least 3 words.
Step 3 - Highlight any of the author’s claims in yellow. Then, highlight any of the evidence they use to support their claim in green. Last, highlight any counterarguments in pink.
...The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.” But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact...It is one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history. Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. Yes, most white Americans presumed African inferiority. And in 1787, proslavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution. But on this matter the slaveholders were crushed. James Madison (himself a slaveholder) opposed the ardent proslavery delegates and stated that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” The Constitutional Convention not only deliberately excluded the word “slavery,” but it also quashed the proslavery effort to make slavery a national institution, and so prevented enshrining the racism that justified slavery. The property question was the key controversy. The delegates could never have created a federal union if they had given power to the national government to meddle in the property laws of the slave states. Slavery would have to be tolerated as a local institution. This hard fact, though, did not sanction slavery in national law, as a national institution, as so many critics presume… The proslavery delegates desperately wanted the Constitution to bar the national government from regulating the Atlantic slave trade...But antislavery Northerners erupted in protest and proposed that the new government have the power not only to regulate the trade but also to abolish it after 1800. The proslavery men..got the date extended to 1808... In the convention’s waning days, proslavery delegates won a clause for the return of runaway slaves from free states. Yet the clause was a measure of slavery’s defensiveness, prompted by then landmark Northern gradual emancipation laws, and was so passively worded that enforcement was left to nobody... Antislavery Northerners further refined the wording to ensure it did not recognize slaves as property. ...Far from a proslavery compact of “racist principles,” the Constitution was based on a repudiation of the idea of a nation dedicated to the proposition of property in humans. Without that antislavery outcome in 1787, slavery would not have reached “ultimate extinction” in 1865. |
Historian Argument #2: Excerpt from “Was the Constitution of 1789 Anti-Slavery or Pro-Slavery?” written by Ian J. Aebel, Visiting Scholar at the University of Iowa in the Department of History, published on the History News Network on September 20, 2015.[2]
S - Source | O - Occasion | A - Audience | P - Purpose |
Step 1 - Read the secondary source historical argument below once to yourself, including any annotations I made as comments below.
Step 2 - Define any unknown words using the right click (two finger tap) define feature and write the definition as a comment. Need to define at least one word per paragraph.
Step 3 - Highlight any of the author’s claims in yellow. Then, highlight any of the evidence they use to support their claim in green. Last, highlight any counterarguments in pink.
...it is important to read between the lines in political documents; the things that are not written are usually just as important as those that are. Why, in a document of more than 4,500 words, did the authors not mention the single most dominating trait of the young nation? According to Wilentz, we should trust James Madison, who noted during the Constitutional Convention that most delegates “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” Yet this statement brings us more questions than answers; why did Madison and his colleagues think it wrong to bring up slavery when nearly all of them were slaveholders? The United States in 1787 was a nation dominated by the institution of slavery and cannot so easily be divided between pro- and anti-slavery factions or provincial distinctions. As many historians have demonstrated over the past several decades, Northern states gained just as much from slavery’s continuation as the Southern ones. We tend to forget that Southern cotton drove the push towards industrialization in New England, Rhode Island was a plantation-style slave society that was the epicenter of the slave trade in the United States, and New York merchants made fortunes insuring the lives of enslaved human beings. Regardless of the anti-slavery rhetoric written by countless delegates to the Constitutional Convention, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison among them, the majority of those individuals who signed the Constitution either owned slaves or profited from slavery in some way. And in spite of pronouncements against slavery, very few of those individuals freed any of those people they had enslaved while they were alive (George Washington being a rare exception). They were each driven by the enormous profits they gained through the institution of slavery, as well as the racial animosity towards those of African descent that had evolved in North America over the past century and a half. Again, we must ask ourselves why, if they were so opposed to the continuation of slavery, did they fail to mention it in the Constitution? We must conclude, therefore, that the Constitutional framers’ failure to adequately address slavery was an act of perpetuating the institution of slavery itself; indeed, the refusal of the delegates to confront slavery and include provisions for its end would be a costly error… The beauty of the U.S. Constitution is in its ability to evolve with the times. Today, through differing interpretations and amendments to the document, the Constitution protects the freedom and rights of numerous groups of people originally left out of the compact, from women to African-Americans to homosexuals and everyone in between. But the fact that the Constitution has evolved into a freedom protecting document does not change the fact that it was originally written in a manner that protected and prolonged the institution of slavery, for the betterment of the vast majority of individuals who gathered to draft it. |
CONTINUE TO NEXT PAGE FOR NEXT STEP
STEP 3 - OUTLINING HISTORIANS ARGUMENTS |
Directions: Using the work you completed with the interpretations above, outline the components of each of their arguments by copying and pasting from the articles above into the appropriate spaces in the table below.
Historian #1 - Wilentz | ||
Claims | Evidence | Do you agree with this historian’s argument? Explain why or why not. Why you found their argument convincing or not. Was their evidence persuasive? |
Historian #2 - Aebel | ||
Claims | Evidence | Do you agree with this historian’s argument? Explain why or why not. |
CONTINUE TO NEXT PAGE FOR NEXT STEP
STEP 4 - WRITING YOUR ARGUMENT TO ANSWER THE IQs: Was the Constitution Pro or Anti-Slavery as it was written in 1787? Is it a racist document? |
Directions: You will answer the above IQs in one well-written paragraph of at least 8 sentences that will become a blog post. This argument paragraph will follow the TEAC structure and utilize evidence from the Constitution and at least one of the two historian’s interpretations analyzed above. USE PAGES 6-7 IN YOUR HISTORY NOTEBOOK TO HELP YOU WITH THIS STEP.
Thesis/Claim (answers the IQ) -must include claim as well as three main reasons (previewing evidence to follow) | The Constitution, as it was written in 1787, should be considered a(n) ____________________ (anti-slavery OR pro-slavery) document because (need to summarize evidence here - 3 reasons) _____________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ |
Evidence #1 to support thesis -must be a quotation -must be from the Constitution or one of the articles above -must cite source and introduce evidence with details about the source -use pg. 6 in history notebook to help you with writing evidence sentences | __________________________ (full name of the historian), an historian from ___________ University ________ (citation verb)…. OR In the Constitution, in article ___, section ___ it states... |
Analysis #1 to explain evidence -explain how the evidence you selected supports your thesis/claim -This shows that… -This means that… -This proves that… -Indicating... | This proves that the Constitution is ____________________ (anti-slavery OR pro-slavery) because... |
Evidence #2 to support thesis -must be a quotation -must be from the Constitution or one of the articles above -must cite source and introduce evidence with details about the source -use pg. 6 in history notebook to help you with writing evidence sentences | __________________________ (name of the historian), an historian from ___________ University ________ (citation verb)…. OR In the Constitution, in article ___, section ___ it states... |
Analysis #2 to explain evidence -explain how the evidence you selected supports your thesis/claim -This shows that… -This means that… -This proves that… -Indicating... | This proves that the Constitution is ____________________ (anti-slavery OR pro-slavery) because... |
Evidence #3 to support thesis -must be a quotation -must be from the Constitution or one of the articles above -must cite source and introduce evidence with details about the source -use pg. 6 in history notebook to help you with writing evidence sentences | __________________________ (name of the historian), an historian from ___________ University ________ (citation verb)….OR In the Constitution, in article ___, section ___ it states... |
Analysis #3 to explain evidence -explain how the evidence you selected supports your thesis/claim -This shows that… -This means that… -This proves that… -Indicating... | This proves that the Constitution is ____________________ (anti-slavery OR pro-slavery) because... |
Counterargument & Conclusion -Following the example of the historians, acknowledge the counter argument here, but refute it with a strong concluding sentence. | While it is true that (counterargument - evidence that supports opposite of your argument)________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________, that does not mean that the Constition should be considered anything but ___________________ (your claim- pro-slavery OR anti-slavery) because (restate your evidence/reasons in own words)_____________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ |
Final Draft Directions: Use the outline above to write your final draft to the IQ below. We will then post this argument paragraph to your blog in class. Give your paragraph a title that reflects YOUR argument and make sure to self-revise as well as share with one other class member before posting.
Final Draft:
Write final draft here. |
Constitution & Slavery Argument Paragraph Rubric | ||
Points Earned | Points Possible | Category |
3 | Clear & specific thesis/claim which answers the IQ and summarizes evidence | |
6 | At least three specific pieces of evidence (quotations) which support the thesis and include appropriate source information (context, details about the source) | |
6 | Analysis which explains how the evidence you selected supports your thesis/claim | |
3 | Following the example of the historians, students acknowledge the counter argument and refute it with a strong concluding sentence. | |
4 | ELA Conventions - Appropriate transitions used. Accurate spelling, punctuation (esp. considering citations), and grammar. | |
3 | Historically accurate. | |
25 | TOTAL (25 points possible) | |
[1] Full text of the article, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/opinion/constitutionally-slavery-is-no-national-institution.html .
[2] Full Text of the article available at http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160650.