Slavery and the Constitution

Col Robert G. Shaw: It stinks, I suppose.
Pvt Trip: Yeah, it stinks bad. And we all covered up in it too. Ain't nobody clean. Be nice to get clean, though.
--Glory

In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), better known today as the Dred Scott Decision, the Supreme Court essentially ruled that slavery was constitutional. The implication was that the Constitution needed to be amended in order to legally end slavery.

Although I've read the Constitution hundreds of times, I confess to having been ignorant on precisely how slavery could be construed as legal in the original document.

The conclusion can be reached in a roundabout sort of way--which perhaps reflected the conflict many of the framers surely felt when merging principles of natural rights with a law that permitted one person to be the legal property of another.

That said, the legality of slavery in the Constitution can in fact be construed from a few passages:

Article 1, Section 2. The third paragraph contains the notorious Three Fifths Clause, which apportioned House representatives in each state according to the number of 'free Persons' plus 'three fifths of all other Persons.' Those 'other persons' were slaves. We know this because at the Constitutional Convention, those from states without strong slaveholder interests argued that each slave should count as zero, while those from states with strong slaveholder interests argued that each slave should count as a whole vote. The compromise was 3/5.

Article 1, Section 9. The first paragraph states "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight..." Some argue that this passage applied to the slave trade. Of course, by the 1850s, this passage no longer held as written as the 1808 deadline had long since passed.

Article 4, Section 2. The third paragraph 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 due." This became the basis for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and later of 1850.

The necessary amendments implied by the Dred Scott Decision eventually materialized during the Reconstruction period. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1865, superceded Article 1, Section 2. The 13th Amendment, enacted in 1868, superceded Article 4, Section 2.