In framing America's national history as pro-slavery to its core, the Times follows, and intensifies, the critical narrative of the nation's founding advanced by the 19th century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Interpreting the Constitution through its clauses that directly addressed slavery, Garrison was the first American to denounce the Constitution as “pro-slavery.” He went so far as to burn a copy of the Constitution on stage on July 4, 1854.
A recent generation of historians—operating under the label of “neo-Garrisonian”—has tried to outdo even Garrison's critique. William Wiecek claimed that at least nine of the Constitution's clauses directly protected or referred to slavery. Paul Finkelman found eighteen clauses tainted by slavery. David Waldstreicher discovered pro-slavery intent not only in the Constitution's text, but in its “contradictions, ambiguities, and silences…,” concluding, “The clauses that relate directly to slavery are not exceptions to the Constitution's remarkable combination of precision and vagueness [regarding slavery]: they epitomize those qualities.” With this neo-Garrisonian critique dominating historical scholarship, it is no surprise that it has affected the broader public discourse; one of the 1619 Project's lead editorials points directly to Waldstreicher in support of the Project's somber affirmation, “Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written.”
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