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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: MasterJaguar01

I found Paul Finkleman's excellent essay on the subject:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/original-sin-electoral-college-proslavery-tool/#!

the Electoral College had little to do with slavery and much to do with a desire to ensure small geographic regions and cities could not control the executive branch....

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, whose state eliminated slavery in 1780, opined that “the great evil of cabal and corruption” could not be avoided under a direct popular vote. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a state which fully disposed of the institution even earlier, called a national referendum “radically vicious,” also failing to mention the slavery motive. Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, a state that passed its gradual emancipation act of 1784, also raised explicit objections against a presidential election through the people at large.

To come to the conclusion that the Electoral College was created in order to protect "the power of slave states,"

one must actively ignore the entire breadth of the Philadelphia Convention debates, everything that was said about such a system in the state ratification campaigns, an array of important context beyond a single Madison quote, and a battery of contradictory evidence suggesting that slavery had nothing to do with the reasons such a mechanism came to be favored for presidential elections.

Source

K.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata


To come to the conclusion that the Electoral College was created in order to protect "the power of slave states,"

one must actively ignore the entire breadth of the Philadelphia Convention debates, everything that was said about such a system in the state ratification campaigns, an array of important context beyond a single Madison quote, and a battery of contradictory evidence suggesting that slavery had nothing to do with the reasons such a mechanism came to be favored for presidential elections.

Source

K.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: MasterJaguar01

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

To come to the conclusion that the Electoral College was created in order to protect "the power of slave states,"

one must actively ignore the entire breadth of the Philadelphia Convention debates, everything that was said about such a system in the state ratification campaigns, an array of important context beyond a single Madison quote, and a battery of contradictory evidence suggesting that slavery had nothing to do with the reasons such a mechanism came to be favored for presidential elections.

Source

100% Nonsense .
One need not ignore anything at all.

The array of "important context" is in no way mutually exclusive of the true motive of the original Electoral College system, which was to protect the institution of slavery.

Not only is there not "a battery of contradictory evidence". There is ZERO contradictory evidence.

This link is completely ridiculous. Benner ignores Madison's and Pinckney's stated motives, and simply reasons that because the Electoral College did not succeed 100% of the time in its objectives, somehow those objectives did not exist. Maybe he should work for the President-Elect?

What a waste of pixels.

Now you're just making shit up. That's not his reasoning, and it's abundantly clear that there were (and are) sufficient reasons for the Electoral College independent of any alleged "true" motivation to further the oppression of blacks.

K.

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The Electoral College is a racist system that helped slave states, and that’s why it should be abolished. That’s one of the many talking points the Left has hurled against our electoral process. In all, it’s just the typical antics of a sore loser. The Electoral College has to go because Hillary Clinton lost and California gave her more popular votes (no kidding since it’s a left wing cesspool). Even The New York Times says the Electoral College has to go because it’s racist (with the three-fifths compromise bit), and because Clinton got more popular votes (though she didn’t win the majority). Once again, the Left shows they have no sense of history, despite being obsessed with being on the right side of it.

Well, Allen Guelzo and James Hulme, a Civil War professor at Gettysburg College and attorney, respectively, wrote in The Washington Post that the Electoral College was instrumental in destroying slavery, it reinforces the concept of federalism, and it’s an overall stabilizing force in our system of government:

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…the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. Some historians have branded the Electoral College this way because each state’s electoral votes are based on that “whole Number of Senators and Representatives” from each State, and in 1787 the number of those representatives was calculated on the basis of the infamous 3/5ths clause. But the Electoral College merely reflected the numbers, not any bias about slavery (and in any case, the 3/5ths clause was not quite as proslavery a compromise as it seems, since Southern slaveholders wanted their slaves counted as 5/5ths for determining representation in Congress, and had to settle for a whittled-down fraction). As much as the abolitionists before the Civil War liked to talk about the “proslavery Constitution,” this was more of a rhetorical posture than a serious historical argument. And the simple fact remains, from the record of the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings (James Madison’s famous Notes), that the discussions of the Electoral College and the method of electing a president never occur in the context of any of the convention’s two climactic debates over slavery.

If anything, it was the Electoral College that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the Electoral College. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the Electoral College would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents...

The Constitution also makes us a federal union, and the Electoral College is pre-eminently both the symbol and a practical implementation of that federalism.

The states of the union existed before the Constitution, and in a practical sense, existed long before the revolution. Nothing guaranteed that, in 1776, the states would all act together, and nothing that guaranteed that after the Revolution they might not go their separate and quarrelsome ways, much like the German states of the 18th century or the South American republics in the 19th century. The genius of the Constitutional Convention was its ability to entice the American states into a “more perfect union.” But it was still a union of states, and we probably wouldn’t have had a constitution or a country at all unless the route we took was federalism.

The Electoral College was an integral part of that federal plan. It made a place for the states as well as the people in electing the president by giving them a say at different points in a federal process and preventing big-city populations from dominating the election of a president...

Without the Electoral College, there would be no effective brake on the number of “viable” presidential candidates. Abolish it, and it would not be difficult to imagine a scenario where, in a field of a dozen micro-candidates, the “winner” only needs 10 percent of the vote, and represents less than 5 percent of the electorate. And presidents elected with smaller and smaller pluralities will only aggravate the sense that an elected president is governing without a real electoral mandate.

The Electoral College has been a major, even if poorly comprehended, mechanism for stability in a democracy, something which democracies are sometimes too flighty to appreciate.

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In 1860, ex-slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, delivered a powerful speech “The Constitution: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” Douglass used the speech to criticize his fellow abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison who called the Constitution a “Covenant with Death” and publicly burned the Constitution because he believed it a pro-slavery document. This view is very common among many modern academics who discredit the Founders for creating a fundamentally flawed constitutional system rooted upon slavery and extinguished through the efforts of uncompromising abolitionists. Douglass thought differently.

Douglass was a former slave who had escaped the horrors of slavery. He was raised on a plantation that was many miles from a mother that he rarely saw. From a young age, he witnessed the brutal whippings of slavery. His spirit was nearly ruined by a “slavebreaker,” but Douglass recovered his manhood when he fought back and refused to be whipped again. He eventually learned to read and learned the power of rhetoric by reading The Columbian Orator. He finally escaped from slavery through the Underground Railroad and recovered his human dignity. He became such a powerful speaker that his listeners did not believe he was a former slave.

What, then, is the Constitution? I will tell you. It is no vague, indefinite, floating, unsubstantial, ideal something, coloured according to one’s fancy, now a weasel, now a whale, and now nothing. On the contrary, it is a plainly written document, not in Hebrew or Greek, but in English . . . . The American Constitution is a written instrument full and complete in itself. No Court in America, no Congress, no President, can add a single word thereto, or take a single word therefrom. It is a great national enactment done by the people, and can be altered, amended, or added to by the people.

Many people today believe that Thomas Jefferson did not really mean all people when he wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence and think that they know who Jefferson really meant. Douglass takes on the same kind of reasoning regarding slavery and the Constitution when he argues that, “The text, and only the text, and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain meaning . . . . instead of looking to the written paper itself, for its meaning, it were attempted to make us search it out, in the secret motives, and dishonest intentions, of some of the men who took part in writing it.” For Douglass, the Constitution must “stand or fall, flourish or fade, on its own individual and self-declared character and objects.”

Douglass starts by asserting that the framers purposefully avoided the mention of slavery in the Constitution. “It so happens that no such words as ‘African slave trade,’ no such words as ‘slave representation,’ no such words as ‘fugitive slaves,” no such words as ‘slave insurrections,’ are anywhere used in that instrument. These are . . . not the words of the Constitution of the United States.”

As Abraham Lincoln said the same year at his Cooper Union address, paraphrasing James Madison at the Constitutional Convention: “Neither the word ‘slave’ nor ‘slavery’ is to be found in the Constitution . . . and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a ‘person.’”

The purpose, Lincoln told his audience was to prevent slavery from being a blot on the American founding and Constitution after slavery had inevitably been extinguished. The founders did this “on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.”

Douglass first addresses the Three-Fifths clause of Article I, section 2 and examines the idea of a slaveholding power. He indirectly demolishes our modern view that it literally meant that the slaves were considered three-fifths of a person. Do not forget that the South wanted to count the slave as a full person for the purposes of representation. Douglass also attacks the idea that this did not create a slave power in the Congress nor did it represent anything less than a compromise over representation and taxation.

“A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution. Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States . . . taking it at its worst, it still leans to freedom, not to slavery,” Douglass avers.

Douglass next addresses the slave trade in Article I, section 9, in which the Congress could not ban the slave trade for 20 years. The founders, Douglass argues, were not protecting the slave trade and thus slavery with this clause but were “providing for the abolition of the slave trade.” And, indeed on January 1, 1808, that is exactly what happened when the 1807 bill that President Thomas Jefferson signed, went into effect. Douglass says that the clause “looked to the abolition of slavery rather than to its perpetuity,” and that the founders intentions “were good, not bad.”

Douglass tackles the “slave insurrection” clause in Article I, section 8. He states that “there is no such clause” because it is a general statement that the chief executive has the power and duty to suppress all “riots or insurrections” in the interests of maintaining law and order. Even if Douglass concedes for the sake of argument that it is aimed at slave insurrections, he turns it on its head and states that, “If it should turn out that slavery is a source of insurrection . . . why, the Constitution would be best obeyed by putting an end to slavery, and an anti-slavery Congress would do that very thing.”

Finally, Douglass discusses the “Fugitive Slave clause” of Article IV, section 9, and believes that it could only be applied to indentured servants and apprentices because slaves were not “bound to service” in the sense that they were contractually obligated to perform “service and labour,” because they could not legally make contracts.

Douglass then examines the larger natural rights principles of the Constitution and argues that they do not support slavery. The purposes of the new constitutional government as stated in the Preamble – union, defense, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty – Douglass tells us, “are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe to them all.” He continues, “Its language is ‘we the people;’ not we the white people.”

Finally, Douglass argues that “there is no word, no syllable in the Constitution to forbid [abolishing slavery].” The North banned slavery in the wake of the American Revolution, the Northwest Ordinance banned it in that territory, and the Missouri Compromise banned it in the northern part of the Louisiana Territory. [you know, some of the overall evidence that kirata was pointing to??] Douglass states that, “The Constitution will afford slavery no protection.”

Douglass’ speech was aimed as much at the radical abolitionists as slave owners as he thought it remarkably imprudent to say “No union with slaveholders.” If the North were to let the South secede, then there would be no moral pressure to end slavery in the new confederacy. Slavery, Douglass tells us, “dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. While in the Union it will meet with both . . . . I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of Union more closely.”

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After all, the fact that men go out of the Constitution to prove it pro-slavery, whether that going out is to the practice of the Government, or to the secret intentions of the writers of the paper [ah, sound familiar??], the fact that they do go out is very significant. It is a powerful argument on my side. It is an admission that the thing for which they are looking is not to be found where only it ought to be found, and that is in the Constitution itself. If it is not there, it is nothing to the purpose, be it wheresoever else it may be. But I shall have no more to say on this point hereafter.

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I, on the other hand, presume him free unless he is proved to be otherwise. Let us look at the objects for which the Constitution was framed and adopted, and see if slavery is one of them. Here are its own objects as set forth by itself: — "We, the people of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America." The objects here set forth are six in number: union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty. These are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all. But it has been said that Negroes are not included within the benefits sought under this declaration. This is said by the slaveholders in America — it is said by the City Hall orator — but it is not said by the Constitution itself. Its language is "we the people;" not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants; and, if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution? Why should such friends invent new arguments to increase the hopelessness of his bondage? This, I undertake to say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the constitutionality of slavery can be made out only by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself; by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by ruling the Negro outside of these beneficent rules; by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean; by disregarding the written Constitution, and interpreting it in the light of a secret understanding. It is in this mean, contemptible, and underhand method that the American Constitution is pressed into the service of slavery. They go everywhere else for proof that the Constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it secures to every man the right of trial by jury, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus — the great writ that put an end to slavery and slave-hunting in England — and it secures to every State a republican form of government. Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America. The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favour of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation...

They see that the Constitution will afford slavery no protection when it shall cease to be administered by slaveholders. They see, moreover, that if there is once a will in the people of America to abolish slavery, this is no word, no syllable in the Constitution to forbid that result. They see that the Constitution has not saved slavery in Rhode Island, in Connecticut, in New York, or Pennsylvania; that the Free States have only added three to their original number. There were twelve Slave States at the beginning of the Government: there are fifteen now.

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Wilberforce and Clarkson, clear-sighted as they were, took this view; and the American statesmen, in providing for the abolition of the slave trade, thought they were providing for the abolition of the slavery. This view is quite consistent with the history of the times. All regarded slavery as an expiring and doomed system, destined to speedily disappear from the country. But, again, it should be remembered that this very provision, if made to refer to the African slave trade at all, makes the Constitution anti-slavery rather than for slavery; for it says to the slave States, the price you will have to pay for coming into the American Union is, that the slave trade, which you would carry on indefinitely out of the Union, shall be put an end to in twenty years if you come into the Union. Secondly, if it does apply, it expired by its own limitation more than fifty years ago. Thirdly, it is anti-slavery, because it looked to the abolition of slavery rather than to its perpetuity. Fourthly, it showed that the intentions of the framers of the Constitution were good, not bad. I think this is quite enough for this point.

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Federalist № 42

The Powers Conferred by the Constitution Further Considered

To the People of the State of New York:

The second class of powers, lodged in the general government, consists of those which regulate the intercourse with foreign nations, to wit: to make treaties; to send and receive ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls; to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations; to regulate foreign commerce, including a power to prohibit, after the year 1808, the importation of slaves, and to lay an intermediate duty of ten dollars per head, as a discouragement to such importations. ¶...

It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren! Attempts have been made to pervert this clause into an objection against the Constitution, by representing it on one side as a criminal toleration of an illicit practice, and on another as calculated to prevent voluntary and beneficial emigrations from Europe to America. I mention these misconstructions, not with a view to give them an answer, for they deserve none, but as specimens of the manner and spirit in which some have thought fit to conduct their opposition to the proposed government. ¶

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The existing Congress, without any such control, can make treaties which they themselves have declared, and most of the States have recognized, to be the supreme law of the land. Is the importation of slaves permitted by the new Constitution for twenty years? By the old it is permitted forever. ¶

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The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing -- not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the anti-slavery majority in Congress. [wait, what?? anti-slavery??]

It was not a pro-slavery Southerner but an antislavery Northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South's political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, understood this; he called the three-fifths clause "a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states," which deprived them of "two-fifths of their natural basis of representation."

And so a provision of the Constitution that was anti-slavery and pro-black in intent as well as effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression…[oh those self defeating founders!]

Even so, the test of the founders' project is the practical question: Did the American founding strengthen or weaken the institution of slavery? The intellectual and moral ferment that produced the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood argues, should be judged by its consequences. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every state in America. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either immediately or gradually; Southern and border states prohibited further slave importations from abroad; and Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.

"Before the revolution, Americans like every other people took slavery for granted," Wood writes. "But slavery came under indictment as a result of the same principles that produced the American founding. In this sense, the prospect of the Civil War is implicitly contained in the Declaration of Independence."

Abraham Lincoln not only perceived the framers' dilemma, but knew that he had inherited it. The principle of majority rule is based on Jefferson's doctrine that "all men are created equal," yet what the political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa has called the "crisis of the house divided" arises when the majority denies that "all men are created equal" and in so doing denies the basis of its own legitimacy.

Lincoln was presented with two concrete options: working to overthrow democracy, or working to secure consent through persuasion. Conscious that he too must defer, as the founders did, to prevailing prejudices, Lincoln nevertheless sought to neutralize those prejudices so they did not become a barrier to securing black freedom. In a series of artfully conditional claims -- "If God gave [the black man] little, that little let him enjoy" -- Lincoln paid ritual obeisance to existing racism while drawing even racists into his coalition to end slavery. He made these rhetorical concessions because he knew that the possibility for securing anti-slavery consent was far better in his time than in the 1780s.

In one of the clearest commentaries on the Declaration, Lincoln observed:

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They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal -- equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. . . . They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

By working through rather than around the democratic process, Lincoln justified the nation's faith in the untried experiment of representative self- government. In vindicating the slave's right to rule himself, Lincoln also vindicated the legitimacy of democratic self-rule.

Lincoln's position came to be shared by Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the Constitution but who eventually reached the conclusion that it contained anti-slavery principles. "Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered," Douglass said. Slavery, he concluded, was simply a "scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building is completed."

It took a civil war to destroy slavery, and with it much of the infrastructure and economy of the South. More than half a million whites died in that war, "one life for every six slaves freed," historian C. Vann Woodward reminds us. But for Lincoln as for Douglass, the greatest white and black statesmen of the time, the triumph of the union and the emancipation of the slaves represented not the victory of might over right, but the reverse. Justice had won out over expediency, and the principles of the American founding had at long last prevailed.

Black History Month is a good time to step aside from the divisive contemporary debates about race and reflect on how much better this country is for blacks and other minorities than at any time in the past, and to give credit to those who made this progress possible. For their role in producing a charter for a society immeasurably better than the one in which they found themselves, the framers deserve our respect and gratitude.

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ORIGINAL: bounty44

its been my experience that he can never adequately deal with the content, and so casting aspersions on the people and sources is his only and illicit, recourse.