Patrick Henry's Case against the Constitution: The Structural Problem with Slavery
2002; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3124758
ISSN1553-0620
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoOn Tuesday, June 24, 1788, after three weeks of impassioned oratory, Patrick Henry rose for his last-ditch efforts to persuade the convention to reject the proposed Constitution of the United States. New Hampshire had ratified three days earlier, making the nine states that could put the new national government into operation theory, although while this news had not yet reached Virginia, it did not really matter. Henry, and everyone else, understood that the new frame of government could not work if held out.1 So, after most of the speeches had been made and most of the out-of-doors arm-twisting accomplished, Virginia's most famous orator pulled out the stops to defeat the Constitution by arguing that northerners would use the new powers of Congress to abolish slavery Virginia. Among ten thousand implied powers which may assume, Henry threatened, they may, if be engaged war, liberate every one of slaves if please.2 Nor would this danger exist only during wars. The Constitution granted the new federal government the of manumission. Have not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? Henry asked. May not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?-May not pronounce all slaves free, and will not be warranted by that power? In fact, Henry claimed, if the Constitution were adopted, Congress inevitably would free your slaves. They would do it for two reasons. First, everyone knew that slavery was evil; even we [that is, the slaveholders] deplore it with all the pity of humanity.3 Second, the Constitution would institute majority rule at the national level, allowing simple majorities the House of Representatives and Senate to pass laws as long as the president did not veto them. Over time, slavery's evil would press with full force on the minds of Congress, which would free the slaves because decided majority of the States have not the ties of sympathy and fellow-feeling for those whose would be affected by their emancipation. Henry's idea that slaveholders were the only ones with an interest slavery's future was obviously short-sighted, although the racism that allowed him to ignore the interests of African Americans was replicated largely the North. Henry rejected the Constitution because he feared that a democratic majority-even of white men only-would refuse to protect the institution of slavery. If a majority of white male Americans might prove willing to abolish slavery, Virginians could not accept such a dreadful and ruinous event: prudence forbids its abolition. Racial violence worried him, but Henry rested the case on economic interest, the fact that great deal of the property of the people of Virginia was at stake. Slaveholders' interests lay perpetuating the institution of slavery: We ought to possess them the manner have inherited them from our ancestors, as their manumission is incompatible with the of the country. The felicity of owning human beings-of inheriting them from one's ancestors no less-must not be subjected to the consent of a national majority. Decisions about slavery must not rest in the hands of those who have no similarity of situation with us. must keep its sovereign power over slavery and, for this reason, the convention must reject the Constitution. What are to make of this speech? Although widely ignored by historians and omitted from the canon of Antifederalist documents, it has been part of an accessible record since the ratification convention was published 1788 by David Robertson (the convention's reporter). It was reprinted every edition of Jonathan Elliot's Debates the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution starting 1827 (including the Library of Congress edition on the World Wide Web) and reprinted again the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. …
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