this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The original US Constitution is explicitly pro-slavery. Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors, but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.
The Constitution was never a unified idealist vision of liberty. It was a grungy political compromise between factions that did not agree on what the country should be. These included New England Puritans (religious cultists; but abolitionist), New York Dutch bankers (who wanted the money back they'd loaned to the states), Southern planters (patriarchal rapist tyrants), and Mid-Atlantic Quakers (pacifists willing to hold their noses and make peace with the Puritans and planters).
The Fugitive Slave Law wasn't part of the Constitution.
Again, not part of the Constitution. Those were the various compromises that the South kept getting pissy about foreseeing the end of Slavery, so they kept threatening rebellion.
If anyone tries to tell you the civil war was about states rights, not slavery... These are pretty obviously about slavery. But if they don't believe that, just let them read the Southern States Declarations of Secession. They say what the civil war's about in their own words.
The Fugitive Slave Clause, which authorized it, certainly is though!
Fair enough! The clause begot the law.