Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (best e reader for epub TXT) 📗

stated that “we must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever persons.”40

The Founders seemed to believe that slavery would meet its natural demise in the United States. At the Constitutional Convention, a Connecticut delegate, Roger Sherman, stated, “The abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States. . . . The good sense of the several states would probably by degrees complete it.”41 George Washington, in a draft of his first inaugural address, expressed the desire for the country to “reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few.”42 Just before his death, Thomas Jefferson, referring to slavery, asserted that “[a]ll eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.”43

The prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass actually believed that the Constitution created an “anti-slavery government.”44 In 1864, Douglass wrote, “It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”45 Technically speaking, Douglass was absolutely right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” yet none of the original text was in any way altered.

It is interesting to note that William Lloyd Garrison, another great abolitionist and editor of The Liberator, a radical abolitionist newspaper, believed that the Constitution was actually a pro-slavery document. He called the Constitution a “pact with the devil.” Frederick Douglass46 had admired Garrison, but when Douglass, in 1851, stated his belief that the Constitution could be used to fight slavery, Garrison and Douglass engaged in a vicious debate in which they communicated through newspapers and letters.

Slavery was a tradition embedded in the culture of the South and played a key economic role there. Its economic importance was the key factor impeding abolition. Nevertheless, slavery is morally reprehensible, and completely indefensible,47 and the fact that many Americans, including the Founding Fathers, recognized that it was wrong, in a way makes us even more responsible for the crimes committed against the African-American race. Frederick Douglass may have been right when he said that the Constitution paved the road for abolition, but it took the United States nearly one hundred years to take serious action.

Preserving the Union

President Abraham Lincoln, known as the “Great Emancipator,” is widely regarded as a defender of black freedom who supported social equality of the races and led us into the American Civil War to free the slaves. According to Lincoln, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”48 Lincoln did, in fact, view slavery as an evil institution, but did not seek to abolish slavery because it was morally despicable. Rather, he only supported an end to slavery when he felt it became necessary to win the war.

Lincoln’s first action as President was to persuade the States to ratify a constitutional amendment that would have legalized and preserved the institution of slavery. The proposed amendment, “The Corwin Amendment,” stated the following: “No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of the State.” Slavery, to Lincoln, was a “domestic institution” under this Amendment. The Amendment, of course, was never formally adopted, as Southern legislatures were already prepared to secede from the Union to express their discontent with federal dominion over their interests.

Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion into America’s new territories not based on any moral duty to uphold the Natural Law, or the need to right inherent wrongs. Instead, Lincoln simply wanted to keep African-Americans out of the West and keep the white and black races separate. In 1857, prior to becoming President, Lincoln expressed his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races . . . A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together”49 (emphases added). Lincoln went on to state that “if white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.”50 Moreover, to alleviate racial tension in the United States, Lincoln favored the deportation of the African-American population to settlements in either Africa or Central America. According to Lincoln:

Racial separation must be effected by colonization of the country’s blacks to foreign land. The enterprise is a difficult one, but where there is a will there is a way . . . Let us be brought to believe it is morally right and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interests, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.51

When the South began seceding from the Union, Lincoln met with leaders from Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, using slavery as a bargaining device. Lincoln promised that the federal government would not interfere with slavery in those states as long as they remained in the Union. Some border states, albeit temporarily, agreed to remain in the Union. Therefore, it is quite clear that Lincoln was willing to support the existence of slavery so long as his federal government stayed intact.

Lincoln was reluctant to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He feared that it would conflict with his goal of “saving the Union,” or rather, expanding the size of the federal government. In fact, Lincoln actually issued a “Preliminary Proclamation” to the Confederacy on