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Slavery and the
Constitutional Convention
2013 Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture
“The Founders were not all-seeing or all-wise. Both history
and their constitutional order developed in ways they
did not foresee and for which they had not provided well.
Yet we ought not to be so harshly dismissive of them.
Because the vision of racial equality . . . is, after all, a vision
built on their commitment to, and their construction of, a
natural rights republic—a republic where all men are held
to be created equal and endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights.”
—Michael P. Zuckert
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the issuance of the Emancipation
Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, seminal
events in America’s effort to deal with and overcome the legacy of
slavery. Key to understanding that legacy is the place of slavery at the 1787
Constitutional Convention and thence in the US Constitution.
In a lecture marking the 226th anniversary of the signing of the US
Constitution on September 17, 1787, Michael P. Zuckert (University of
Notre Dame) critically examined the leading pro and antislavery interpretations
of the Constitutional Convention and offered an alternative analysis
tied to a more accurate and less anachronistic reading of the principles and
politics of the Founding era. Zuckert’s lecture was the second in a series
named for distinguished AEI scholar Walter Berns.