At NRO, Timothy Sandefur: The Anti-Slavery Constitution. From the beginning:
It’s become an article of faith on the left that America was founded by racists who wrote the Constitution in part to preserve slavery. Historian David Waldstreicher calls it “a proslavery constitution, in intention and effect.” Yale law professor Akhil Amar labels the Constitution “pro-slavery.” Author Ibram Kendi claims that the Framers “embraced Black inferiority” and “enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.” And the New York Times’ “1619 Project” purports to “reframe” American history by positing not only that the United States was founded “as a slavocracy” but that “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” is the result of “slavery — and the anti-black racism it required.”
There’s nothing new about these assertions. The idea that America is premised on white supremacy has been a commonplace of political debate ever since it was proffered by pro-slavery intellectuals in the 1830s. What’s astonishing is the degree to which it has been adopted by today’s progressives. In his 1857 Dred Scott ruling, Chief Justice Roger Taney claimed that when the Founding Fathers said “all men are created equal,” they really meant only white men. Today, many left-wing journalists, lawyers, politicians, and academics would hasten to agree.
But the reality is more complex and, in some ways, more ennobling. Far from being a given at the time, the constitutional status of slavery was the subject of intense dispute in the decades before the Civil War. One side of that debate argued with much plausibility that slavery was already unconstitutional, decades before adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
This is unjust, and it gives a distorted picture of the legal history of slavery. …
(Via Randy Barnett at Volokh Conspiracy, who has more).
Posted at 6:23 AM