The slaveholders of the South have used the powers vested in them by the Constitution for their own interests, as every other selfish association of man would have done under the same circumstances, with the same powers and under the same temptations.
Josiah Quincy, Sr. August 16, 1854
MOST OF THOSE "same powers" are still there lying in wait to be used in the Constitution and "same temptations" have used them right up to today. Only today it's not only what would be the Confederate states but a number of states, many of which hadn't been in the country at the time. It is the combined powers of white supremacy and Republican-fascism whic uses those and the extra powers they get under the usurpations of the Supreme Court and the anti-democratic Senate rules. In the end, and in the ever slippery issue of the "interpretation" of the Constitution by legally trained "justices, it's those "same temptations" that have brought us some of the worst results.
I got that excerpt from Josiah Quincy, Sr., others below, and the one from J. Q. Adams given the other day from Wendell Phillips' book "The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact," third edition, 1856. I have looked at the pages around that date from Adams' enormously important and just plain enormous diary - maybe the most extensive diary ever kept - from November 4th 1844 when he was talking to a friend about going to North Bridgwater to give the speech to the entry for November 6th in which he describes the meeting at which he gave it. There's something chilling in being able to read a text and then read the author talking about what he was doing in the days he was writing it and, in this case, giving it as an address. You feel a real connection to him through reading his diarys. In the case of John Qunicy Adams, I doub there is anyone who could have given a more inside and intimate view of the years from the Revolution to 1846, he having been a public servant of the period, boy, man and old man, on the most initmate terms possible with one of the chief founders of the country, his father, on very intimate terms with many if not most of the most illustrious of them and a witness to the entire period who recorded so much of it in his decades long diary.
I should have kept on with the quote as given by Wendell Phillips because the paragraph after what I gave here the other day is even more obviously relevant to the actual corruption of the Constitution as we live under it today, not in small part because the constitution of the Senate and the Electoral College and other pro-slavery features of the Constitution have given small, often reactionary mostly lily white states such outsized power over states like California and New York. And the role that such things hold in the reimpoisition of neo-Jim Crow and the nationalization of the bodies of Women who were just as excluded from exercising the political power that was ennumerated through their numbers, under the Constitution. We still have no Equal Rights Amemndement.
Of the increasing abomination of slavery in the unbought hearts of men at the time when the Constitution of the United States was formed, what clearer proof could be desired, than that the very same year in which the charter of the land was issued, the Congress of the Confederation, with not a tithe of the powers given by the people to the Congress of the new compatct, actually abolished slavery forever throughout the whole Northwestern territory without a remonstrance or a murmur. But in the Articles of Confederation, there was no guarantee for the property of the slaveholder - no double representation for him in the Federal councils - no power of taxation - no stipulation for the recovery of fugitive slaves. But when the powers of government came to be delegated to the Union, the South - that is, South Carolian and Georgia - refused their subscription to the parchment, till it should be saturated with the infection of slavery, which no fumigation could purify, no quarantine could extinguish. The freemen of the North gave way, and the deadly venom of slavery was infused into the Constituion of freedom. Its first conseqence has been to inver the first principle of democracy, that the will of the majority of numbers shall rule the land. By means of the double representation, the minority command the whole, and a knot of slaveholders give the law and prescribe the policy of the country. To acquire this superiority of a large majority of freemen, a perserving system of engrossing nearly all the seats of power and place, is constantly for a long series of years pursued and you have seeen in a period of fifty-six years the cheif magistracy of the Union held, during forty-four of them, by the owners of slaves. The Eecutive departments, the Army and Navy, the Supreme Judicial Court and diplomatic missions abroad, all present the same spectacle; - an immense majority of power in the hands of a vary small minority of the peole - millions made for a fraction of a few thousnds.
. . . From that day (1830) SLAVERY, SLAVEHOLDING, AND SLAVE BREEDING, AND SLAVE TRADING HAVE FORMED THE WHOLE FOUNDATION OF THE POLICY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, and the slaveholding States, at home and aboroad; had at the very time when a new census has exhibited a large increase upon the superior numbers of the free States, it has presented the portentous evidence of increased influence and acendency of the slaveholding power.
Of the prevalence of that power you have continual and conclusive evidence of the suppression for the space of ten years of the righ of petition, guranteed if there could be a guarantee against slavery, by the first article amendatory of the Constitution.
I'm not exactly certain of what the 1830 date refers to, I suspect it was one of the many pro-slavery Supreme Court rulings that tried to make the entire country effectively slave-country. I've been looking for the entire text of that address because I think there must be far more in it relevant to my argument that the slave-power infection of the Constitution was known and exposed by John Quincy Adams who may have had the most comprehensive knowledge of the background of the drafing and adoption of, not only the Constitution but the Articles of Confederation and knew their relevance to the struggle against slavery and how the anti-democratic features of the Constitution held that abomination in place. What he said about the abolition of slavery in the Northwest territories (as they were then) by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation formed the main issue in the later Dred Scott case that allowed the Supreme Court under Taney to, effectively, extend slavery to even the free states om what he hoped for, was perpertuity. As I've pointed out here, the Dred Scott decision was the first real and effective use of the Supreme Court usurped powers, not found in the Constitution, to nullify duly adopted laws of the federal congress and executive banches. A power which the Court has continually used to overturn any effective remedy against our indigenous form of fascism, White Supremacy - probably mirroring somewhat the proportion of time that Adams gave as how much of the time the slave-power held a stranglehold on federal offices.
There is so much here that is of obvious relevance to the bending of the Constitution under the corrupt feature of the undemocratically constituted Senate (certainly part of what Adams called "the double representation," not based on the population but giving states with even the lowest numbers of people, far more than double the power to confirm or block the appointment of federal judges given to the most populous states, Supreme Court "justices," federal appointees of the kind that Adams noted were in the hands of slave holders for the large majority of his time up to and even after the Civil War. Today that designation might be given by what we call the same thing today, white supremacists. They certainly held the Supreme Court most of its existence, the Roberts Court is firmly held by the modern form of that, today.
Wendell Phillips went on to give other excerpts, not only from abolitionists but, also, to pointing out that Taney and the corrupted once-abolitionist James Storey who issued what was the prior abomination to the Dred Scott decision in the Prigg vs. Pennsylvania. It makes real eye-opening reading as, in fact, does the entire literature of abolitionist writing, especially when they talk about slavery under the Constitution, in the Congress (especially the Senate) and, most of all, under the most corrupt and least democratic of the branches, the Supreme Court and the lower courts under them. The Roberts Court is merely doing what is typical of most of the Supreme Courts in most of their decisions and actions have done, preserved the rights of privilege of the wealthy and powerful which were obtained by blackmail during the Constitutional Convention and inserted into the Constitution where most of it lays unchanged by the Civil War Amendments.
Wendell Phillips give an except from an Address on the Annexation of Texas, by Stephen C. Phillips, of Salem, in it he says.
Still, while I am reluctant to receive the Constitution from the hands of its framers as a bequest of slavery to their posterity, I am compelled to admit, that, in the light of the subsequent history of the country, I now see clearly, that, in its legislative and judicial interpretation, in the claims which have arisen under it, in the measures in which its authority has been exercised, the Federal Constitution has practically become the palladium of slavery, - that by fixture of its provisions, though it is not named in one of them, slavery has been accredited as an institution, and has been maintained as such on the basis of a compact binding upon all the States - and that the"compromises of the Constitution, " in the popular sense of that Shibboleth of the anti-abolitionists, comprehend the power to enforce the most odious pretensions of slavery, and especially to make the free States the instruments of guarding it against the influences of freedom, even to the extent to requiring of their citizens, in opposition to their moral and religious principles, to act as a police for the arrest of fugitives, and to expose their lives in military service in resisting the retributive consequences of insurrection.
In the subsequent history from then, it's clear that the structures of the federal government in the Constitution, and especially under "judicial interpretation" that the same privileging of a minority in the corrupt compromises of the Constitution have been put to use for white supremacy and the millionaires and billionaires who are the current players in the role that the slave-powers and "Eastern" financiers played in the late 18th and early 19th century when the book was published. All of the anti-democratic features of the Constitution have served that purpose, from the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the role given the second least democratic body to confirm people for the federal judiciary and other offices, the doubly corrupt Electoral College, etc. And those appointed and in the Senate have served that function more than they have egalitarian democracy. Adding to that are the previously mentioned usurped powers the Court took for itself and things like the filibuster which allows one senator from a tiny state to have the power to thwart any legislation or a supremely stupid senator and failed football coach from one of the most backward bastions of white supremacy to block hundreds of vitally important military appointments.