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I've seen people make the argument that the Constitution is inherently corrupted because it was written by white slave owners, and that it doesn't represent all

by daenz 5y ago

I've seen people make the argument that the Constitution is inherently corrupted because it was written by white slave owners, and that it doesn't represent all people because there was a time when it didn't represent all people (slaves). It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas because the flawed human founders didn't follow them in totality.

rayiner 5y ago
Attacking the Framers for their hypocrisy this is really backwards when you think about it. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in human society. The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. Opposition to being an enslaved group was, of course, universal, but that didn't necessarily give rise to an opposition to slavery as a practice. The Old Testament describes God punishing Egypt for enslaving the Jews, but doesn't condemn the practice subsequently. What's notable about European Christians, including the Founders, isn't that they practiced slavery, but that they recognized that it was categorically evil (not just evil in particular applications). The Founders laid the intellectual and legal framework for eliminating slavery in America, and ultimately world-wide, through American influence. For example, I'm not sure the Muslim world would have eliminate slavery even by today without Western pressure: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/world-cup-2022-qatar-s-workers-slaves-building-mausoleums-stadiums-modern-slavery-kafala-a7980816.html https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/w.... Criticizing the "hypocrites" who only took the first steps towards dismantling an institution that they inherited from antiquity is odd.
- syki 5y ago
  Do you have evidence that all of the founders thought slavery was categorically evil? I doubt this very much but could be wrong. Apparently they thought forming a more cohesive federal system was more important than abolishing slavery. As to what you wrote about the Quran and the Bible. From my perspective that provides convincing evidence that the supreme entity described in those books does not provide a reasonable example of “good”.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    "... He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life & Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the Opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a Market where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his Negative for suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable Commerce: and that this Assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die, he is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase that Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former Crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another. ..." A passage which was removed from the Declaration of Independence in order to avoid unwanted controversy over the issue in Great Britain, which was yet to abolish slavery themselves. (It was finally abolished in 1833.)
  - Clubber 5y ago
    I'm not sure about all of them, but here's a good summary. Take it for what you will; as always, real life is a lot more nuanced than a summary paper. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-constitution-and-slavery https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-res...
  - bhupy 5y ago
    Pretty much every Founder thought that slavery was a huge political shit-sandwich that made Federalization difficult, and they all hoped that the Federal system would sow the seeds for its eventual abolition. The infamous Cornerstone Speech was an interesting view into the Founders' perspective. It was the speech given by the Vice President of the unrecognized Confederate States of America, describing the Confederate view of the Founders' philosophy: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp > ...the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
- stirfish 5y ago
  >The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. The ten commandments were delivered to a band of freed slaves. "Thou shall not steal" was closer to "thou shall not kidnap (steal people)".
  - krapp 5y ago
    And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery, and capturing female sex-slaves in warfare was explicitly permitted by Moses. The Old Testament also contains numerous laws and customs about the treatment and adjudication of slaves, no outright condemnation. And the New Testament, Paul tells slaves in Ephesians to be loyal to their masters, and in Colossians, for slave masters to treat their slaves fairly. 1 Peter 2:18 even tells slaves to obey their masters when they're abusive. Neither Jews nor Christians saw slavery as fundamentally evil, rather they saw the relationship of master to slave as simply a reflection of humanity's relationship to God. Man was made in the image of God, and man was to God as a slave was to their master - something metaphorically touched upon numerous times in the New Testament. The ethics of the Bible are a product of the time and culture in which any part of it was devised, so it not being explicitly anti-slavery isn't surprising. Concepts like universal human equality (Kings and nobles not having divine right) and slavery being objectively evil are progressive, post-Biblical ideals.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery Then again, freed Black slaves ended up practicing slavery of other Blacks in Liberia, of all places. Truly, there's nothing new under the sun.
vkou 5y ago
Nobody's asking to throw out the good ideas, most people raising that argument would just like people to stop treating it as an unerring sacred biblical text that can, and has never done any wrong.
mikestew 5y ago
It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas Were it not for slavery, we arguably wouldn't have to put up with the Electoral College, and I would not place the Electoral College in the bucket of "brilliant ideas". Instead I argue, "see? Make too many compromises, and you end up with bullshit like the Electoral College, where white men get to override the wishes of the general population because those voters can't be trusted." My point is that, yes, it's obviously horrible that slavery happened. Now, how much of our governmental system is the result of "brilliant ideas" and how much is the result of appeasing those that feel they can own other human beings as property?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states. The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    This stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.
- hackeraccount 5y ago
  "arguably" is doing a lot of work if you say that slavery was the reason for the E.C.
- 5y ago
yucky 5y ago
We should throw out all ideas from flawed people. Then we can truly enjoy bliss.
wbsss4412 5y ago
I think the idea is that we don’t deify people who were largely just normal politicians, sorting out political compromises of their own time. They didn’t invent democracy, nor republicanism, they built on long standing traditions.
stirfish 5y ago
'Corrupted' doesn't mean unsalvageable. It's easier to patch a broken system than it is to make a flawless system on the first try. You can't start patching a brilliant set of ideas until you look directly at the flaws and their sources. Like, voting is a great idea, but they forgot women in v1.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Both options have the potential to be right, but only accepting patch fixes is prone to being stuck in local minima. I'm increasingly with Thomas Jefferson and the idea that the constitution should be rewritten fairly often, on the order of each generation. If there's consensus each 20 years for simple patch fixes (or even no changes), great! If there's consensus for a more radical restructuring then that's just democracy in action.
tptacek 5y ago
That "brilliant set of ideas" included a number of overtly pro-slavery clauses (most notably the 3/5ths Compromise), and others that worked synergistically with the over pro-slavery stuff to prolong slavery (and which have janked up our democracy every since). For more detail on this argument than you'll ever want, here's a starting point: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243060 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243060

by daenz 5y ago

rayiner 5y ago

Attacking the Framers for their hypocrisy this is really backwards when you think about it. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in human society. The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. Opposition to being an enslaved group was, of course, universal, but that didn't necessarily give rise to an opposition to slavery as a practice. The Old Testament describes God punishing Egypt for enslaving the Jews, but doesn't condemn the practice subsequently. What's notable about European Christians, including the Founders, isn't that they practiced slavery, but that they recognized that it was categorically evil (not just evil in particular applications). The Founders laid the intellectual and legal framework for eliminating slavery in America, and ultimately world-wide, through American influence. For example, I'm not sure the Muslim world would have eliminate slavery even by today without Western pressure: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/world-cup-2022-qatar-s-workers-slaves-building-mausoleums-stadiums-modern-slavery-kafala-a7980816.html https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/w.... Criticizing the "hypocrites" who only took the first steps towards dismantling an institution that they inherited from antiquity is odd.

syki 5y ago
Do you have evidence that all of the founders thought slavery was categorically evil? I doubt this very much but could be wrong. Apparently they thought forming a more cohesive federal system was more important than abolishing slavery. As to what you wrote about the Quran and the Bible. From my perspective that provides convincing evidence that the supreme entity described in those books does not provide a reasonable example of “good”.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "... He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life & Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the Opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a Market where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his Negative for suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable Commerce: and that this Assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die, he is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase that Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former Crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another. ..." A passage which was removed from the Declaration of Independence in order to avoid unwanted controversy over the issue in Great Britain, which was yet to abolish slavery themselves. (It was finally abolished in 1833.)
- Clubber 5y ago
  I'm not sure about all of them, but here's a good summary. Take it for what you will; as always, real life is a lot more nuanced than a summary paper. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-constitution-and-slavery https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-res...
- bhupy 5y ago
  Pretty much every Founder thought that slavery was a huge political shit-sandwich that made Federalization difficult, and they all hoped that the Federal system would sow the seeds for its eventual abolition. The infamous Cornerstone Speech was an interesting view into the Founders' perspective. It was the speech given by the Vice President of the unrecognized Confederate States of America, describing the Confederate view of the Founders' philosophy: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp > ...the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
stirfish 5y ago
>The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. The ten commandments were delivered to a band of freed slaves. "Thou shall not steal" was closer to "thou shall not kidnap (steal people)".
- krapp 5y ago
  And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery, and capturing female sex-slaves in warfare was explicitly permitted by Moses. The Old Testament also contains numerous laws and customs about the treatment and adjudication of slaves, no outright condemnation. And the New Testament, Paul tells slaves in Ephesians to be loyal to their masters, and in Colossians, for slave masters to treat their slaves fairly. 1 Peter 2:18 even tells slaves to obey their masters when they're abusive. Neither Jews nor Christians saw slavery as fundamentally evil, rather they saw the relationship of master to slave as simply a reflection of humanity's relationship to God. Man was made in the image of God, and man was to God as a slave was to their master - something metaphorically touched upon numerous times in the New Testament. The ethics of the Bible are a product of the time and culture in which any part of it was devised, so it not being explicitly anti-slavery isn't surprising. Concepts like universal human equality (Kings and nobles not having divine right) and slavery being objectively evil are progressive, post-Biblical ideals.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery Then again, freed Black slaves ended up practicing slavery of other Blacks in Liberia, of all places. Truly, there's nothing new under the sun.

vkou 5y ago

Nobody's asking to throw out the good ideas, most people raising that argument would just like people to stop treating it as an unerring sacred biblical text that can, and has never done any wrong.

mikestew 5y ago

It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas Were it not for slavery, we arguably wouldn't have to put up with the Electoral College, and I would not place the Electoral College in the bucket of "brilliant ideas". Instead I argue, "see? Make too many compromises, and you end up with bullshit like the Electoral College, where white men get to override the wishes of the general population because those voters can't be trusted." My point is that, yes, it's obviously horrible that slavery happened. Now, how much of our governmental system is the result of "brilliant ideas" and how much is the result of appeasing those that feel they can own other human beings as property?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states. The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.
- tptacek 5y ago
  This stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.
hackeraccount 5y ago
"arguably" is doing a lot of work if you say that slavery was the reason for the E.C.
5y ago

yucky 5y ago

We should throw out all ideas from flawed people. Then we can truly enjoy bliss.

wbsss4412 5y ago

I think the idea is that we don’t deify people who were largely just normal politicians, sorting out political compromises of their own time. They didn’t invent democracy, nor republicanism, they built on long standing traditions.

stirfish 5y ago

'Corrupted' doesn't mean unsalvageable. It's easier to patch a broken system than it is to make a flawless system on the first try. You can't start patching a brilliant set of ideas until you look directly at the flaws and their sources. Like, voting is a great idea, but they forgot women in v1.

monocasa 5y ago
Both options have the potential to be right, but only accepting patch fixes is prone to being stuck in local minima. I'm increasingly with Thomas Jefferson and the idea that the constitution should be rewritten fairly often, on the order of each generation. If there's consensus each 20 years for simple patch fixes (or even no changes), great! If there's consensus for a more radical restructuring then that's just democracy in action.

tptacek 5y ago

That "brilliant set of ideas" included a number of overtly pro-slavery clauses (most notably the 3/5ths Compromise), and others that worked synergistically with the over pro-slavery stuff to prolong slavery (and which have janked up our democracy every since). For more detail on this argument than you'll ever want, here's a starting point: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243060 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243060