Historians today speak of the “proslavery Constitution” and “antislavery constitutionalism”; they almost never speak of the “antislavery Constitution” or of “proslavery constitutionalism.” This fact is a testament to the profound success of the critique of the Constitution leveled by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In his condemnation of the Constitution as proslavery, his resort to Madison’s “Notes from the Constitutional Convention” to demonstrate this case, and his rejection of the Constitution’s authority—all punctuated by his dramatic burning of that document during a Fourth of July address—Garrison has set the terms within which subsequent historical debate on the relationship between the Constitution and slavery has been carried out.
Even historians who disdain Garrison’s caustic critique of the Constitution, who question his partial readings of the Convention’s debates, and who emphasize the development of constitutional arguments that culminated in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments concede at some level Garrison’s premise that the Constitution was intended to be proslavery. Thus, it is sad, but not surprising, to see that the mob rounded up by the New York Times’s “1619 Project” is setting fire to the project of antislavery constitutionalism. Garrison’s belief that the Constitution was intended to be proslavery is an unquenchable fire that will eventually consume all it touches.
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