That “America Needs A New Constitution” sounds radical, but not to George Kenney.

The men who wrote the Constitution devised it, above all else, to make possible a compromise, a union between North and South, for defense against foreign adversaries and for active expansion toward the West. The South agreed only because the Constitution guaranteed a wealthy minority — Southern slave holders — disproportionate control over national policy. [1] We forget this sordid history because it’s convenient to do so, but also at our peril.

Despite the eventual abolition of slavery the Constitution’s procrustean rules long outlasted the purposes for which they were intended, yet, unfortunately, have proven a suitable non-sectional means for subsequent privileged generations, the super rich, to continue the abuse of large numbers of people. Our rules define not merely an undemocratic system, but a fundamentally anti-democratic one. What worked for the antebellum plantation owner works just fine for the Wall Street plutocrat, and others.

The system has three critical flaws: The Senate, the Electoral College, and the states.

George William Van Cleve talked on Kenney’s podcast about the history of the Constitution and his book, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. But increasingly during the contested politics of the early republic, abolitionists cried out that the Constitution itself was a slaveowners’ document, produced to protect and further their rights. A Slaveholders’ Union furthers this unsettling claim by demonstrating once and for all that slavery was indeed an essential part of the foundation of the nascent republic. In this powerful book, George William Van Cleve demonstrates that the Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. He convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than mere political compromises–they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire. In order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor, and the cost of their allegiance was the deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America’s leaders through the nation’s early expansion. Reconsidering the role played by the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, Van Cleve also shows that abolition there was much less progressive in its origins–and had much less influence on slavery’s expansion–than previously thought. Deftly interweaving historical and political analyses, A Slaveholders’ Union will likely become the definitive explanation of slavery’s persistence and growth–and of its influence on American constitutional development–from the Revolutionary War through the Missouri Compromise of 1821.

American historiography has moved definitively from the hagiography of the Founders to Van Cleve’s book. But, after reading C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner on Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, and the Progressive Era, it seems Van Cleve has centered the debate in the last place anyone else wanted to have it: during the Founding.

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Filed under: Academia, History, Podcasts, Politics, USA Tagged: electric politics, george kenney, george william van cleve, slavery. constitution