White Supremacy’s Roots in the Constitution — The Slave Power Conspiracy
I began my journey on Facebook, then sequentially interacted with Twitter, Instagram, Substack, and now Medium — each format represents my views with a different perspective. Depending on where you first encounter me, your perceptions will be partial, biased, or misinformed. Few will care about my past postings, qualifications as an historian, or anything more than possibly what is in this opening paragraph. This snapshot moment will be viewed independently of preceding snapshots from various sources giving the reader a limited two dimensional view of me. Why should you care to explore my views any further? This is how history is most often taught…a singular view from a snapshot provided by one source with no regard to the completeness, bias, or validity of the information. If you care to read no further, then chances are your history views are limited to what you were superficially taught and not to the actual complexities of history. If you continue to read, then your mind is open to a viewpoint that may challenge your core beliefs.
The Founding Fathers’ roles and wisdom in American History are accepted as gospel and revered. But history is in the eye of the beholder. Rarely will one find a single correct factual version. In reality, we often accept the view that feels most comfortable for us based on our own biases and sources of information. The transition between history recorded, who recorded the history, and the telling of history is how facts becomes distorted over time. This country’s history has been whitewashed with misinformation, misperceptions, bias, and missing information. Our general acceptance of what we have been told is most likely, not completely factual. What is accepted as truth and how these perceived truths form an opinion is as individualistic as a fingerprint. Whose “finger” is on the history telling will impact what is presented and accepted as truth.
I believe in a conspiracy theory…not ones that relate to the letter Q but one that began before the Constitution was written and persists today.
I believe in a conspiracy theory that influenced the Founding Fathers and impacted the writing of the Constitution. John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, among other notables, articulated this conspiracy theory in the 1840s. Those who attempted to validate this conspiracy provided a combination of facts and statistical data reflecting the South’s lengthy disproportionate level of Federal power. Lincoln and his Republican party recognized this “Slave Power Conspiracy” as a strategic agreement among Southern slaveholders to protect their interests including: the preservation and expansion of slavery, the elimination of civil liberties, the minimization of the Federal government role, and the preservation of an American aristocracy.
The conspirators were not limited to the South. Northern capitalists had plenty of their own economic self-interest for encouraging slavery. The Northern industrial production and trade in finished goods from Southern cotton formed a mutually interdependent profit center built on the backs of slavery. Northern shipping transported and marketed slaves, and there was even an auction block on Wall Street. Northern merchants and Southern slaveholders formed an oligarchy of economic and political power that the Founding Fathers not only served but benefited from directly.
To clarify, I am not referencing the legal definition of “conspiracy” defined as actors with a common cause creating an unlawful plan. I am, however, applying the word as a broader concept. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a conspiracy theory as a “belief that an event or situation is the result of a secret plan made by powerful people.” The “Slave Power Conspiracy” meets this broader definition.
Our Constitution is a document held on high as being of principle and written by the brightest aristocratic patriots of its day. However, this document and its authors are tainted by the Slave Power Conspiracy. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners and of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, about 25 owned slaves. Many of our sanctified Founding Fathers including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (who did not sign the Constitution but authored its foundation, the Declaration of Independence) and James Madison, owned a substantial number of slaves. Most of the Founding Fathers were members of the economic elite and were either slaveowners or capitalists dependent upon the economics of slavery. The primary purpose in creating the Constitution was to create a federal government that would be run by their peer group. Therefore, how could the Constitution not be a product of a conspiracy to maintain economic and political power for their new white aristocracy?
While some of the Constitution’s flaws are in plain sight, the most telling flaw is conspicuous by the failure to mention the word ‘slavery’ anywhere in the document. Although the word is never used, slavery’s power relationships are carefully considered and protected in the document.
This is not a coincidence. Slavery was the primary economic and political issue of its time and everyone had an opinion on the subject. For slavery to be an oversight in such a carefully drafted document is as likely as the making of a meatless meatloaf. The Founding Fathers used slavery byproducts through clauses and coded words but avoided including the most relevant ingredient, the actual word ‘slavery’ in their document production. The ‘enslaved’ who were initially viewed as only capital assets, were now elevated to being considered 3/5s human in the representation census in the Constitution. This apportioned more legislative power to the slaveowners (and none to the enslaved) with greater representation in the Federal government and in the Electoral College. The establishment of the Electoral College was to assure that the ‘right people’ would get into office. While most of the Founders gave lip service to the rights of man, they generally believed the overall population was too ignorant and incapable of self-government. It is more likely that these new American aristocrats were fearful their own political and economic power as a minority would be challenged by the majority.
How does the Constitution not use the word ‘slavery’ when there were so many provisions assuring its existence? The Constitution prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years through Article 1, Section 9 which stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation” of persons prior to 1808. The Constitution’s Fourth Article gave enslavers the right to seize enslaved people who escaped to free states protecting the slaveowners. To assure there would be no trouble from the enslaved, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 empowered the Federal government to put down “domestic rebellions” which was a well-known code for slave revolts. All of these Constitutional inclusions demonstrate the devil’s bargain the Founders made because Southern political support of the Union was more important than human rights. Omitting the word ‘slavery’ from the Constitution, reflects that not only did the drafters intend to preserve and enfranchise the institution of slavery, they intended to hide their work from casual review by the people.
Now for those still reading, you may be thinking this isn’t news or maybe these comments are from a leftist radical viewpoint that should be dismissed. Surely, our Founding Fathers were beyond reproach. Hamilton, for example, was so wonderful that his life became a Broadway hit…and yet this portrayal failed to mention that his wife’s family was one of the largest slave owning families in New York with over 40 slaves. As to the play’s demi-god himself, it is unclear if Hamilton personally owned slaves, but he profited through the slave trade by helping others to buy and sell slaves.
Southern Founding Founders were well-noted political contradictions. James Madison who tellingly observed that “All men having power ought to be mistrusted,” never freed his own slaves and supported slavery in the Western Expansion. Thomas Jefferson, famously stated, “all men are created equal,” while he owned more than six-hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime. And George Washington, the Nation’s Father, actively traded in slaves and preserved slaves for his household even after his death.
Many want to excuse these men as simply being representative of their time. But, what about the abolitionists, the Quakers, and others of the same time period? John Adams who owned no slaves with an active farm in Quincy, Massachusetts, actively supported judicial decisions which abolished slavery in Massachusetts…was he brought into the Convention through time travel? His wife, Abigail Adams (an under-appreciated progressive thinker) was not only an abolitionist, but a feminist. Senator Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts antislavery Republican, was beaten with a cane while sitting in the Congressional chamber for his abolitionist views…another time traveler? I believe the majority of the Northern and Southern Founding Fathers cannot be blindly excused as products of their time but must instead be viewed as guilty of pursuing protection of their own personal wealth and power. Like the true politicians they actually were, the Founding Fathers preached one thing and practiced another.
The ugly truth is that both the Northern and Southern Founding Fathers made compromises and omissions in the name of their “more Perfect Union” while maintaining personal economic and political power. They may not all have been self-serving, but apparently none of them were willing to risk their personal privileges through a Constitutional end to slavery. With their ultimate goal to unite the nation, slavery was a bargaining chip that was compromised and traded away to create an imperfect Union.
Some allegedly believed slavery would eventually fade away on its own in time. However, history would prove them naïve. The Union was divided by a bloody civil war over slavery. Reconstruction following the war was abandoned because African Americans were advancing to levels equal or even surpassing some whites. To stop the progress, Southern states imposed a different form of enslavement through Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation that oppressed Blacks, suppressed voting rights to reduce a Black voice in politics, and increased Black incarceration to provide a new source of free labor to white capitalists.
So why does any of this matter today? Because the input from the Slave Power Conspiracy is still baked into the Constitution. Even after the post-Civil War amendments, white supremacy remains the backbone of our legislative and judicial system. When conservative scholars advocate ‘originalism’ in interpreting the Constitution today, more than two centuries after its drafting, they argue that the Founding Fathers’ intent in the writing of the Constitution should govern the Constitution’s application. The Founders’ compromises crafted from their conspiracy still live on in our structurally undermined Constitution. Equality was abandoned as a governing principle and white supremacy was allowed promotion to govern its structures. The Founding Fathers intentionally established a government of some people but not all people. This is why we are considered a Republic and not a true democracy because we have a representational government, not a government by all the people.
Inequity exists in America because of the foundation of white supremacy which is intrinsically incorporated into the Constitution…the document that governs the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government.
If the Constitution was written to support white supremacy and if there are elected and judicial figures who believe in following the thought process of slaveowners, is it any surprise that systemic racism is part of the American fabric?
Systemic racism didn’t just happen. The roadblocks to popular government and empowerment of a conservative, racist minority to block racial progress grew from a perception that African Americans were subhuman and enslaving people was economically and politically more important than human rights. Aside from overt voter suppression, these systemic voting roadblocks subjected Blacks to poll taxes and guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar that prevented most Black voters from reaching the polls. Today, gerrymandering and voter restrictions continue to minimize the ability and impact of the Black vote as white preferential treatment in the United States is viewed as threatened by the rising nonwhite population. Black incarceration replaced enslaved labor with imprisoned labor for capitalists. Schools were segregated and inequity has been perpetuated because an educated Black person is a political and economic threat to white privilege.
Just as the Founders were naïve in believing that slavery would die out on its own, it is naïve for us to believe that today’s racial divisions came from nowhere and were only inflamed because of the previous president’s pandering to racism. Instead, our nation has continued its journey on our well-established path of systemic disempowerment through white supremacy that is rooted within the Constitution. By ignoring the Founding Fathers’ flaws and elevating them to an infallible state, we remain blind to the system’s inherent racial bias and cannot fix systemic errors. If whites choose not to fight for systemic change, then we perpetuate the unholy bargain made by the Founding Fathers and in doing so, we have also decided our white privilege is worth more than equal human rights. Through our complicity, we share in the sins of our Fathers as the beneficiaries of an inequitable system by intentional design.
