OK, I've been going around the web reading news, reading commentary and I've decided that this Founders fetish has gotten totally out of hand and as the founders words are continually used to destroy egalitarian democracy, it is seriously dangerous. I am going to start posting that book I've been advocating for most of the past year to show what a bunch of sleazy operators the likes of Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the Founders were as they betrayed every lofty ideal floated in the Declaration of Independence (which was actually a watered down version of the original draft, due to similar interests of slave owners and the aristocrats who wrote it) when they drafted the real deal in the Constitution.
The book was written after the abolitionists were shocked by the 1840 publication the papers of James Madison surrounding the writing and adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which forced them to reconsider what they, as Americans, had been taught and had assumed, that the fabled founders were men of integrity and honesty who really believed the empty words of the Declaration that "all men are created equal". Empty not because that's not true but because virtually all of them, starting with the man who penned the words, Thomas Jefferson, proved that they really didn't mean it. Once that little matter of a revolution that swept British rule away, Jefferson discovered how much he liked owning slaves and he set about not only getting more slaves for himself but in figuring out by scientific methods, how to extract more value from them in the form of slave labor. He was not anywhere near the only one of the Founders who did that, once they could safely abandon those "enlightenment" sentiments carried in the Declaration. They competed with anything King George did by way of injustice and wrong once they were the ones in charge. In so far as it concerned non-white people, they outdid him.
For anyone who wants to read it now, the book by one of the greatest of 19th century abolitionists is The Constitution a pro-slavery compact; or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc. selected by Wendell Phillips, you can find it at Archive.org. It is shocking, especially things like the revelation that the guy who they're rapping and boogieing over on Broadway, Alexander Hamilton, was up to his aristocracy loving neck in enhancing the slave power even as he pretended to oppose it.
As I mentioned, when you look at our current politics, the state of the law, the corruption of our elections, virtually everything the Supreme Court and lawyers and hacks for the oligarchs have used to thwart equality and democracy and even the rule of the majority has its origins in the Constitution as written by those Founders that people worship like pagan idols in ancient Rome. And they intended it to do just the things that they do do now. I have pointed out that they have even figured out how to turn Lincoln's emancipation to their advantage, disenfranchising former slaves now counted as 5/5ths of a person for apportioning representation in the House of Representatives gives the descendants of the slave owners two-fifths more power than they had before the Civil War. That is the genius of the corruption contained within the Constitution. Any prospect we have for defeating Republican fascism depends on understanding how Republican-fascists on the Court have used those slave-owner enhancing features of the Constitution to do what they were intended to do, merely putting the words of the slave owners in modern guise.
The Constitution a pro-slavery compact; or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc. selected by Wendell Phillips
INTRODUCTION.
Every one knows that the "Madison Papers" contain a Report from the pen of James Madison, of the Debates in the Old Congress of the Confederation, and in the Convention which formed the Constitution of the United States. We have extracted from them, in these pages, all the Debates on those clauses of the Constitution which relate to slavery. To these we have added all that is found, on the same topic, in the Debates of the several State Conventions which ratified the Constitution; together with much of the speech of Luther Martin before the Legislature of Maryland, and of the Federalist, as relate to our subject; with some extracts, also, from the Debates of the first Federal Congress on slavery. These are all printed without alteration except that, in some instances, we have inserted in brackets, after the name of the speaker, the name of the State from which he came. The notes and italics are those of the original, but the editor has added a note on page 11, and two notes on page 52, which are marked as his and we have taken the liberty of printing in capitals one sentiment of Rufus King's and two of James Madison's - a distinction which the importance of the statements seemed to demand - otherwise we have reprinted exactly from the originals.
These extracts develop most clearly all the details of that "compromise," which was made between freedom and slavery, in 1787; granting to the slaveholder distinct privileges and protection for his slave property, in return for certain commercial concessions on his part toward the North. They prove also that the nation at large were fully aware of this bargain at the time, and entered into it willingly and with open eyes.
We have added the late "Address of the American Anti-Slavery," and the letter of Francis Jackson to Governor Briggs, resigning his commission of Justice of the Peace - as bold and honorable protests against the guilt and infamy of this national bargain and as proving most clearly the duty of each individual to trample it under his feet.
The clauses of the Constitution to which we refer as a pro-slavery character are the following.
ART. 1, SECT. 2 -Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states, which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.
That passage of the Constitution, that infamous act of counting slaves for purposes of representatives while giving that representation to their enslavers is almost universally believed to have been abolished in the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, and if not then then in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1965. But that is a lie. First the end of reconstruction and Jim Crow and the various acts of the Supreme Court before the Warren era and after, which deprived Black People and others of the right to vote but to count them as full people when it comes to giving the neo-Jim Crow states congressional representation is an enhancement of the voting power of those who deprive them of their rights and who use that power to further disempower and exploit them. It is how the Republican Supreme Court in the Rehnquist and Roberts era have made it the law of the land that Republicans get to win even when they have fewer votes, not unrelated to the infamous Bush v. Gore ruling that put Roberts and Alito on the court.
The corruption of our country flows directly from the choices that Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the Founders made in the corrupt deal that Wendell Phillips documented in the very words of those men. It is why Republican-fascism is on the verge of destroying democracy today.
To be continued:
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