How the Constitution Was Indeed Pro-Slavery
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On Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders told his audience at Liberty University that the United States “in many ways was created” as a nation “from way back on racist principles.” Not everyone agreed. The historian Sean Wilentz took to The New York Times to write that Bernie Sanders—and a lot of his colleagues—have it all wrong about the founding of the United States. The Constitution that protected slavery for three generations, until a devastating war and a constitutional amendment changed the game, was actually anti-slavery because it didn’t explicitly recognize “property in humans.”
Lincoln certainly said so, and cited the same passage from Madison’s notes that Wilentz used. But does that make it so? And does it gainsay Sanders’s inelegant but apparently necessary voicing of what ought to be obvious, what David Brion Davis, Wilentz’s scholarly mentor and my own, wrote —that the nation was “in many ways” founded
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