What Slave Power Enhancing Features Are Still Part Of The Constitution - A Response

 A COMMENT ASKS ME what pro-slavery features there are in the Constitution.  I don't want to deal with the entire and largely time-wasting exercise of answering everything brought up in the comment which I may yet post but I will answer, in part, that question.  

Slavery as an officially legal entity was alleged to have ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the adoption of the 13th Amendment, though that was hardly the only kind of slavery which has been part of the American system and society from the start.  

During the mid-1800s, when Abraham Lincoln and his like were at their height of activity there was deep and serious concern about and discussion of a form of slavery which was not restricted to Black People in slave states but which was and is a real thing in every state in the country, wage-slavery.   

And talking about "slavery" as if it were only the legalized enslavement and commerce in human beings lets us off too easily because as soon as Rutherford Hayes made his corrupt deal with the still very real slave-power in the former Confederate States and their allies in the other states, the long period of Jim Crow and very real but de facto slavery of Black People continued until at least the mid-1960s and persists in reality in some places along side wage slavery which never was abolished.  That, in many cases, the worst of the wage-slavery states are identical to the Jim Crow and Confederate states, is not any huge surprise.  Legalized chattel slavery had the effect of driving down the ability of people who labor for a living to negotiate, force, really,  better pay and working conditions.  That is something which, in the idiocy of "regionalism," used the learned racism of so many of the white workers to participate in their own wage-enslavement.  

I WILL NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE WAYS THAT THOSE WHO BENEFIT FROM SLAVERY DUPE THOSE THEY HAVE USED TO SERVE AS TOOLS IN THEIR OWN AND OTHERS' ENSLAVEMENT.  The "free press" is as thick as thieves with that effort and it has been since the beginning.  That is as much an honest story of the "free press" as Joshiah Lovejoy and the rest of the up-side of that lore.  The fact that most of the suckers the Confederacy got to fight the Civil War on behalf of an economic system that victimized them only somewhat less than Black slaves, legal slavery being a major contributor to their own, lesser enslavement is something that if the poor-whites really twigged onto, would probably radicalize them to the left in ways that are hard to imagine.  

The obvious surviving, originally intended slave power favoring parts of the Constitution still in effect are the anti-democratic features of it.

A. The anti-democratically constructed Senate.  It should never be forgotten that the Senate has been the places where even anti-lynching legislation was killed for decades during the height of lynch law, and that's only one example of its infamous history.  I'd say it has enormous responsibility for giving us such Courts as adopted Dred Scott in the 19th century and right up today to the neo-Jim Crow Roberts Court.  Today, many of the most regressive states are not, in fact, the former confederate states, though all of those are dominated by white supremacy in their congressional delegations.  Even many of the "free states" at the time of the Civil War are participants in that now.

B. The Electoral College as opposed to the popular election of the president, the anti-democratic membership of the Senate figuring heavily in that.  Without that Rutherford Hayes would never have been president and there would likely have been no corrupt deal.  That history of the electoral college begins with the third election in which the slave-holder, Jefferson, won over the first president and only one until Lincoln who never held someone in slavery, John Adams.

C. The awarding of House representation based on the general census instead of the number of voting age citizens who are allowed to vote.
  a. That was something that was a part of the infamous 3/5ths counting of slaves for that purpose.*
  b. As discussed in the footnote, that is something very alive today, even outside of the Confederate states, extending wherever suppression is an active strategy of Republican-fascists, right now.  

D. The provision that bans taxing exports is still in effect, still benefiting those who practice wage slavery as much as it did those who insisted on it as a ban on the taxation of slave labor in the production of, originally, tobacco and other slave produced export goods.  That is an abomination that is a tax on every American who would have to pay less in taxes if exports were taxed, one which if Americans understood it, they'd insist on it being abolished through amendment.  Though they'd be lied out of it by the "free press."

E.  There are other, subtle features that may not have been intended to facilitate slavery but those are some of the major ones.  I might, in the future, transcribe an excellent presentation of that which Paul Finklemann made, impressively off the cuff, in an interview he once gave.  But I've got some trouble with my eyes right now and transcribing from a video is hard on the eyes.  
 
* In the original Continental Congress, when they were figuring out how the various states were going to support the military who were to fight the aristocrats' war for independence, as soon as that was going to be assessed on the basis of population, the South didn't want Black People to be counted at all since that meant they'd have a larger tax bill, claiming those held in slavery were property and not persons.  They got their way by blackmailing the rest of them in that case and, in any case, were among the states infamous for not honoring their commitments in either man-power or money.  

That changed when it came to writing the Articles of Confederation and, especially, the Constitution when they insisted that the slaves they had no intention of considering as persons when it came to voting for their own representation, be counted fully as "persons" when it came to the number of representatives the slave states would send to the House.  As the fine American historian, Paul Finklemann has pointed out, the very same members who had heard the opposite claimed in the Continental Congress as the Revolution was being planned didn't bring up the slave-powers' hypocrisy on that point,  that slaves weren't persons when it came to assessing responsibilities but now they wanted them to count for representation - representation which would be stolen by their enslavers.  The 3/5ths "compromise" was one of the most putrid aspects of the Constitution, one which, as Finkelmann has also pointed out, ironically benefited the Southern slave-power because when they counted as 5/5ths of a person under Jim Crow, the same enslavers got to steal their complete representation for themselves.   That is something the Roberts Court is using to reinstitute neo-Jim Crow now.  That the same Court is certain in the process of exacerbating wage slavery for white and other workers is not in any way separate from that.   That was the key to my understanding of how the way that representation is assigned by a censes count AND NOT BY HOW MANY RESIDENTS OF VOTING AGE WERE ALLOWED TO VOTE, has ever been a slave-power, now Republican-fascist asset in the Constitution.

I don't see much hope for changing that last thing, which would force states reluctant to allow Black People, other People of Color, other targeted citizens and residents to vote lest their state lose representation which is now stolen for the vote suppressors and white supremacists.  Not all of the slave-power enhancing features of the Constitution were originally intended for what they are used for now. 

Update:  How could I have forgotten John Quincy Adams!  Well, it was early in the morning when I wrote this.  However, his presidency gives me the chance to point out that, ironically, his own presidency was the product of an Electoral College produced deal with the slave-power, something which his later career as a House member he did a lot to try to repent of.