Abstract
This article argues that the 1787 Constitution was overwhelmingly proslavery, giving explicit recognition and multiple protections to only one form of property: slaves. It exempted only one type of international commerce from full congressional jurisdiction: the African slave trade; guaranteed that the free states could not interfere with ownership rights of only one kind of property: fugitive slaves; denied the states the power to regulate the status of only one type of person, a fugitive slave who was treated as property to be summarily “delivered up on Claim” to a person claiming ownership of the slave. Congressional apportionment took into account only one form of privately held property, by allocating representatives—and presidential electors—based on the number of slaves in a state. The Constitution made it impossible to end slavery by statute or amendment, because until the Civil War there always enough slave states to prevent a ratification of any Amendment, and as long as fifteen or more slave states were in the Union, they could block any constitutional amendment, even today in a fifty-state Union.