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A view of the Constitution

Finkelman's negative view of the Constitution as originally structured can be traced to two related points. First, the documentary evidence is all on the side of the view that the delegates were quite conscious that they were deliberately accommodating slavery as a matter of political expediency and did what they could to limit public exposure of that fact. That would help explain why the word slave does not appear in the original text. The second point that supports the negative view of the Constitution is that "slavery would emerge to complicate almost every debate" on the document, including but not limited to representation and various commerce provisions (194).

The famous three-fifths clause that counted slaves for purposes of both legislative representation and proportionate tax liability/contribution of the slave states was a compromise provision reached by agreement of northern and southern delegates. However, Finkelman points out that when the compromise was first agreed to there was no "quid pro quo" from the South on the representation issue and that the taxation portion of the provision was added only later in the convention. Debate on the provision was ostensibly on big- vs. small-state legislative representation, but the dominating subtext was how much power the slave states, which had more population by virtue of their large slave populations, would get to wield on matters of national policy. The pattern of negotiation that Finkelman describes shows the delegates repeatedly returning to the challenge of accommodating the South's slavery practices. Some delegates seem to have feared that the South would not join the new nation if its needs were not accommodated. Others who opposed counting slaves for representation purposes did not do so on moral grounds but because they absorbed the idea that slaves were property and not persons. Finkelman cites Madison's analysis that North-South differences and not sectional ones we...

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A view of the Constitution. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:34, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689308.html