"If the Constitution was antislavery, it was really, really bad at it."

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Kevin M. Kruse Retweeted

If the Constitution was antislavery, it was really, really bad at it.

Link to tweet

[Shermann]

1. The same is true of the Bible nt

[former9thward]

2. The Constitution allowed Congress to make the importation of slaves illegal starting in 1808.

Which Congress did in 1807. Congress thought that would cause slavery to die a "natural" death as a result. It didn't, of course, but that was the thinking at the time.

This compromise was done because the southern states did not want Congress to have any ability to limit importation of slaves.

[iemanja]

3. The abolition of the slave trade absolutely

did not cause it to die a natural death, and the framers knew that. The population of slaves was self-reproducing at the time the Constitution was written. Then, the conflicts of the 1850s and the rise of the Free Soil Movement emerged in reaction to the burgeoning slave population that, according to white slaveholders, required the export of slaves into the new territories to avoid significant black majorities and with them the threat of rebellion. Slaveholders lived in fear of a Haitian-like rebellion on US soil. The Free Soil Movement sought to arrest the importation of slaves into the new territories.

The Constitution sought to balance the interests between the slaveholding South and the lesser slaveholding North. It was not anti-slavery.

More on the Constitution's protection of slavery:
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-constitution-and-slavery

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. You can mostly thank Eli Whitney for that

the cotton gin and the demand for American cotton from the burgeoning British textile industry were more responsible for perpetuating slavery (and slaveowners' insistence on westward expansion of slavery) than anything else.

[iemanja]

5. Yes. nt

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. A history of the British cotton industry

You got me to look it up.

A history of the British cotton industry

Claire Hopley | @BHTravel_ Nov 05, 2021

{snip}

The introduction of cotton

In the 1790s, the first newly planted cotton came from American plantations manned by slaves. The raw cotton had to be cleaned before it could be used by the fast-moving equipment, but it was taking a full day for one person to remove the seeds from one pound of cotton. Eli Whitney, a New Englander, solved that problem with his cotton gin, which used a series of steel disks fitted with hooks to drag the cotton through slots in a grid, leaving the seeds behind. This invention both spurred the Industrial Revolution in Britain and induced Southern planters in America to grow more cotton.

Britain not only had clean supplies of American cotton and an array of machines to handle every stage of making it into cloth, but it also had good power supplies. Eighteenth-century machines typically used water power, hence the siting of early factories near the fast-flowing rivers of the Pennines. But after James Watt invented the steam engine in 1781, coal became the main fuel. Serendipitously, England's richest mines were also near the Pennines in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire. Thus, these northern areas became the textile strongholds of the country.

{snip}