A nation built on slavery

Today’s episode of ‘you can’t be serious’ is provided by Sean Wilentz in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Willentz is arguing that Bernie Sanders is wrong to say that the United States was founded on racist principles. His evidence:

THE Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, and joined by abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.”

The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass. Yet the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery persists, notably among scholars and activists on the left who are rightly angry at America’s racist past. The myth, ironically, has led advocates for social justice to reject Lincoln’s and Douglass’s view of the Constitution in favor of Calhoun’s. And now the myth threatens to poison the current presidential campaign. The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.”

But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact, as Lincoln and Douglass explained. It is one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.

Yes, that’s really his argument.

Okay, so let’s set aside the fact that there is a whole of lot of room for ‘racist principles’ to wreck havoc on lives over the centuries that doesn’t even include the bare fact of slavery, and just focus on the simple question of slavery.

Willentz is arguing that the Constitution rejected the principle of racial human bondage, and rejected it so firmly that…a war had to be fought to enforce the question, and three new Amendments had to be written and jammed through in order to protect those rights.

Sometimes I just can’t even…

(By the way, if you want some good history on the relationship between slavery and the founding, I found Mark Graber’s Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil to be pretty good.  Dred Scott was an evil decision, but it’s hard to show that it was ‘wrong’ according to the standards available at the time.

It’s a terrible and ironic truth about our nation’s founding that Calhoun–an evil man espousing an evil position–in many ways had the most clear-eyed perspective on what the Constitution demanded.)