The Constitution: A Moral Challenge

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Unlike any governing document in history, the U.S. Constitution inscribed liberty and individual rights into law. But how could America espouse freedom at its founding and also permit slavery? Robert George, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, examines this moral conundrum.

Script:

“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.”

These, of course, are stirring words from America’s Declaration of Independence. They are the foundation of America’s commitment to civil liberty. We accept them as a given now, but only because we know America’s history.

At the time, they presented a serious challenge to the founders of the nation:

Could they create a governing structure that would match the high moral standards they had set for themselves?

Their first attempt did not go well.

The Articles of Confederation, the document that governed the country through the Revolutionary War and for a few years after, was such a miserable failure that many in England (and America) thought the new nation would soon collapse and return, hat in hand, to the mother country.

The Americans’ wariness of central power was understandable. Americans had fought and died to win freedom from an oppressive government. They weren’t about to give away that hard-won freedom to a new government of their own making.

The Articles allowed for no central authority to speak of. There was no chief executive; no effective way to impose or collect taxes; no provision for the national defense. All the power belonged to the individual states. And since the states disagreed on so many issues, almost nothing got done.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 brilliantly solved this problem. It installed a system of checks and balances within the federal government and divided power between the federal government and the states. It did so while still preserving basic civil liberties.

Only a few years later, the founders would buttress these liberties with a Bill of Rights specifically protecting the free exercise of religion and the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly among other rights in the Constitution. This step, too, was taken to bring the country closer to the vision of the Declaration.

But, here, of course, the founders faced a moral challenge: how could America espouse freedom and also permit slavery?

Many of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration, and George Washington, who presided at the Constitutional Convention, were slaveholders.

This fact leads some people to condemn America’s origins. The truth is that great men—and they were great—like Washington and Jefferson violated their own ideals in holding slaves while proclaiming equality and liberty.

They knew that slavery was an evil. Jefferson, speaking of slavery, declared that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever…” Washington, upon his death, freed his slaves and made financial provisions for them in his will.

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