Dr. Lawrence Goldstone spoke about slavery’s presence in the United States Constitution in the Center for African American Studies on Wednesday.
“Slavery is the pivot that was most significant,” Goldstone said. “America’s most sacred document is shaped by slavery.”
Goldstone holds a PhD in American Constitutional Studies and is the author of “Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the U.S. Constitution” as well as co-author of nine other books.
Chair and Professor of African American Studies Renée Romano introduced Goldstone, saying that although the Constitution is seen as a “timeless document,” several important historical figures have questioned its legitimacy. Romano offered as an example Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said in 1987 that the Constitution was “defective from the start.”
Goldstone discussed the difference between the philosophical and practical views of historians toward the founding fathers.
He completed the lecture by noting the ironies in the Iraqi constitutional process today.
Goldstone opened his lecture by sharing the reactions he had while studying the constitutional debates. Many Americans, he argued, view the founding fathers as near-deities beyond reproach. However, Goldstone posited, the founding fathers were not having philosophical discussions—rather, they were talking about what would get them what they wanted.
Goldstone’s realization of the self-serving motives behind the Constitution was complemented by personal work experience.
“[While working] on Wall Street, I had my real epiphany,” Goldstone said.
He said Wall Street businessmen are interested in choosing the option that will yield them the most money. His epiphany was that, similarly, the men drafting the Constitution wanted the option that would provide them with the most opportunities for money. Goldstone claimed that in this way the people who debated the Constitution were not too different from people living today.
“[They had a] desire for security, economic self-interest, and a protection of the way of life,” Goldstone said.
When the constitutional convention’s members are viewed as average people instead of the John Lockes, the key concepts change. Viewed in this light, the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution can be seen as being driven primarily by economic considerations.
Even though the word slavery never appears in the Constitution, subtle sections such as the 3/5 compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause mean that it was an important institution in 18th-century America, he said.
The lecture continued with Goldstone dividing the United States into three components: the Deep South, Virginia, and the North. Each of these sections had their own wishes for slavery’s role in the new country. Although both the Deep South and Virginia wanted to continue slavery, the Deep South wanted to continue the slave trade, whereas Virginia wanted to end it. The North’s anti-slavery sentiments were not strong enough to prevent slavery from shaping the Constitution. According to Goldstone, the northern delegates had to either “follow their conscience or their pocketbooks.”
An important issue in the Constitution was determining representation in the new Congress. Since there were 271,000 slaves in Virginia, its delegates wanted them to count for part of the population, even if they could not vote. The North was reluctant to count the slaves at first, because it would be to their advantage that slaves were not counted. Eventually, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. This compromise was a blow to both the North and the South.
“Southerners had to admit that slaves were people, and Northerners had to admit that slaves were property,” Goldstone said.
The Electoral College that the U.S. uses today is a result of slavery, he said. Southerners did not want direct election of the president because they were a minority in the population, especially because slaves could not vote. However, because slaves were still counted in the population census, the South received more Electoral College votes. Goldstone said that any president who won his office without the popular vote—for example, George W. Bush in the 2000 election—obtained the office as a result of slavery.
Miriam Leshin ’10 was interested in how this lecture related to her Early African American History class.
“He brought up points that we hadn’t talked about in class,” Leshin said. “The section about the North getting increased power over Navigation Acts further proved his argument.”
Heads rose when Goldstone introduced Iraq to his lecture by way of analogy. Even though the delegates wanted to unify the United States by writing a Constitution, the Constitution that they wrote eventually led America into Civil War.
“We forced people in Iraq to draw a constitution to avoid a civil war, except it didn’t work for us,” he said.
Therefore, according to Goldstone, writing a constitution in Iraq may not solve the turmoil in the country, as it did not in the United States. More important, he said, is a dedication to the ideology behind the constitution.
“If you don’t have a commitment to freedom, you don’t get freedom,” he said.
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