Slavery: Why did it take so long to end it in America?

Module 4
Slavery
By: Lee Davenport


As I think about the Atlantic slave trade where African people were commodities to be traded along with rice, sugar, tobacco, etc.. I have a hard time staying objective when trying to write this blog. The slave trade triangle in the Atlantic from roughly 1450-1900, nearly fifty million Africans were killed or enslaved. (Zinn, P.26) I was trying to build a relative time line in my mind to compare the slave trade with other events going on in the world at the time so I revisited the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States which I will use as my primary sources for this post. (Click the pictures for the documents.)
As I read and reflected on these empire shaping documents, I can not help but notice some contradictions of words on words and words on actions. I have known my entire life that slavery was and is wrong; is it the society we live in?, is it the point in human evolution where we finally understand the evils of enslavement and forced labor? or are we just a fluke in a bubble and in a hundred years slavery will be the norm again? I say no to all the above, I believe that we as a race, a human race, have known since the beginning of conscious thought that enslavement is wrong. So why then in modern "civilized" times when the world was creating such beautiful works of art and architecture, had stabilized governments and empires, and had written laws and consequence did it take so long for slavery to end in America?

In the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence it says " We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" ("the pursuit of property" was how Thomas Jefferson originally penned it. ) The point here is that in 1776, the founders and framers of our nation knew that slavery was wrong, they knew it had to be changed, they wrote it down and signed it for all to see, but did nothing to stop it. The last sentence in the Preamble Jefferson writes "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security." I do not believe it is a coincidence that the word "despotism" is used here, as it means a single authority rules while everyone else are slaves. This statement also means that those with the power to change the wrongs, have the duty, and responsibility to change them.

Eleven years later the Constitution of the United States was written (another chance to end what they all knew to be wrong) Article 4: Section 2 states " No Person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be do." says state lines will not help slaves escape servitude. This Article was amended some eighty years later in 1865, that is two years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It boggles my mind how an issue of such importance can be swept under the rug for a century after the founders proclaimed it was wrong. Even after the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution was in place and completely abolishing slavery, there was nothing done to make the "freedmen equal to whites under the law." (Unger, P.425)

300 years before the United States was a sovereign Nation, slavery was big business; shipping millions of people to the Americas as slaves knowing it was a crime against humanity (Antonio de Montesinos, Bartolome de las Casas, et. al.) and after the Declaration of Independence was penned and signed stating slavery was wrong but kept it in place, and a century later when President Lincoln abolished slavery and the Constitution was amended former slaves now "brown races" were still not equal. Jump ahead for a minute another hundred years, the 1960's STILL had segregation and mass scale racism in the United States of America, why? I am afraid I am at a loss for a logical conclusion in regards to why after so many centuries of American history did slavery still exist. One could argue that the economy and "free market" was built on slavery and servitude and that everything may have collapsed if it was handled in the beginning, but we will never know because they did not try.

Sources used:

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: Volume one: American Beginnings to Reconstruction (New York, The New Press, 2003) P.26

John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 2006) P. 41, 82-113

Irwin Unger, These United States: The Questions of our Past: Volume II: Since 1865 (New Jersey, Prentice Hall,1989) P.420-426

The National Archives Experience, “The Charters of Freedom”, “The Declaration of Independence”http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/declaration_transcript.html (accessed September 20, 2007)

The National Archives Experience, “The Charters of Freedom”, “The Constitution of the United States”http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_transcript.html (accessed September 20, 2007)