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6 SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
of the debates between these different groups, but a brief summary
will be useful. Two main issues separate these two groups. One is:
how favorable was the Constitution produced in 1787 to slavery?
The second is: what were the motives upon which the Founding
generation acted when they acted with regard to slavery?
Now the Neo-Garrisonians answer the first question by saying that
the Constitution was very favorable to the institution of slavery—
that the Constitution gave slavery a great deal of life-sustaining aid,
including recognition of its moral legitimacy. To them, the Constitution
was indeed an immoral compromise.
The Neo-Lincolnians, while conceding that the Constitution did
indeed contain some accommodations to the institution of slavery,
deny that these were nearly as substantial as the Neo-Garrisonians
claim. And they particularly deny that the Constitution stamped the
institution with some kind of recognition of its moral legitimacy.
The Neo-Garrisonians answer the second question about the
motives behind the actions of the Founders by saying that they were
moved by the same complex of motives that led to the establishment
and thriving of slavery in the first place: greed, racism, Christian
triumphalism, and moral indifference.
The Neo-Lincolnians, on the other hand, emphasize the place of
slavery in the constitutional order as due primarily to the press of
necessity: they argue that without these concessions to slavery, the
Union could not have been made, and so to them the Constitution
was a moral, or at least a necessary, compromise. The Neo-Lincolnians
frequently point in this connection to the expectation—or the
hope, anyway—among many of the Founders that the process of
abolition begun in the states during and just after the American
Revolution would continue until slavery had been removed from
the land.
The scholarly debates on the place of slavery in the Constitution
can be very heated. The topic is indeed so controversial that the parties
cannot even agree on how many parts of the Constitution are
relevant to slavery. One Neo-Garrisonian that I know found in the
Constitution 18 clauses directly or indirectly supportive of slavery.
The Neo-Lincolnians find far fewer (only three): the three-fifths