DEBATENATE

Topics / America

The challenge

“America was founded on slavery”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. America was founded in spite of slavery, on a principle that doomed it. The Declaration says all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. That sentence was a time bomb under every slave market in the country. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery himself, said in eighteen fifty-two that the Constitution, read as it ought to be, is a glorious liberty document. You'll say founders owned slaves and wrote compromises into the Constitution. They did, and it was evil. But slavery was as old as the world. What was new in seventeen seventy-six was the idea that killed it. Let me ask you this: if the founding was built on slavery, why did Douglass, Lincoln and Dr. King all reach back to the founding to end it? Slavery was the sin America inherited. Liberty was the promise America made.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The founding creed is a universal claim of human equality. It became the moral standard the abolitionists swung against slavery.

    The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life and liberty.

  2. A man who had been enslaved himself concluded that the Constitution's principles were on the side of freedom.

    In his 1852 speech 'What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?', Frederick Douglass said that, interpreted as it ought to be, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.

  3. The founding generation took real early steps to limit slavery's spread, even while it failed to abolish it.

    The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the original Constitution never uses the word slave.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: The Constitution protected slavery through the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause and a twenty-year shield for the slave trade.

Nate: Those clauses are real, and they were compromises with evil. But look at the three-fifths clause. The slave states wanted enslaved people counted in full to boost their own power. The anti-slavery side wanted them not counted at all. And Congress banned the import of slaves the first moment the Constitution allowed it, in eighteen oh eight. The framers bent to slavery. They didn't build the house on it.

What he grants the other side

Many founders owned slaves, and the Constitution accommodated slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment.

The lines

Sources

  1. Second Continental Congress, Declaration of Independence (1776)
  2. Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (1852)
  3. Confederation Congress, Northwest Ordinance (1787)
  4. Constitutional Convention, Constitution of the United States (1787)

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