that fact was preceded by the fact that in its founding document the United States had absorbed the idea that enslavement should be linked strongly and exclusively to Africans.
With one stroke, despite the disclaimers of its advocates, [the three-fifths compromise] acknowledged slavery and rewarded slave owners. It is a measure of their adjustment to slavery that Americans in the eighteenth century found this settlement natural and just (Robinson 201).
The whole matter was further complicated by Article IV.2 of the Constitution, which specifically does not provide for freeing of slaves who enter free territory--and which virtually guaranteed future "liberal" interpretation of the Fugitive Slave Law (Robinson 229-30). The lineage of slavery's socially respectable history and its unexamined assumptions--even after Emancipation--can be seen in a now infamous and oft-cited retrospective review of the phenomenon.
Ulrich B. Phillips acknowledges the trauma of slaves' "wrench from Africa" (291) but insists that "the relation of planter and slave was largely
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