 Greetings from the National Archives Flakeship Building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the Ancestral Lands of the Nacot's Tank Peoples. I'm David Terrio, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's program, which explores the topic of slavery and the Constitutional Convention. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Friday, October 22, at noon, NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will discuss her work on the International Space Station and share insights from scientists, activists, and change agents who are working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. Her new book is Back to Earth, and on Wednesday, October 27, at 1 p.m., Nathaniel Filberg will discuss travels with George, his new book that recounts his own modern-day journey based on George Washington's presidential excursions. October is American Archives Month. What better way to celebrate our documentary past than to discuss one of our founding documents, the U.S. Constitution? In today's program, Slavery and the Constitutional Convention, you'll hear from constitutional experts and see clips from a new documentary series called Confounding Father, a Contrarian View of the U.S. Constitution. This series combines historical film clips with commentary from constitutional scholars. These experts discuss the 1787 debates in the Constitutional Convention, the compromises made, and present-day controversies around the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Dozens of educational films from the motion picture holdings of the National Archives appear throughout the series. Many of these are Cold War-era films from the vast U.S. Information Agency collection. The beginning of Confounding Father may look familiar to many of you. The camera follows tourists into the Rotunda in a 1953 film made by the Air Force entitled Your National Archives. The documentary also highlights Confounding Father, Luther Martin of Maryland, who opposed ratification of the Constitution. Martin is one of the 25 key figures of the Constitutional Convention depicted in a mural in the Rotunda of the National Archives building here in Washington. This program is part one of this discussion. Part two entitled Anti-Federalists and the Bill of Rights will be in December. And now it's my honor to welcome our distinguished panel. Our moderator, Richard Hall, recently retired after a 30-year career with C-SPAN and is the director and co-producer of the four-part series Confounding Father, a Contrarian View of the U.S. Constitution. Joining him today are panelists Paul Finkelman, Chancellor of Gratz College in Greater Philadelphia and author of Slavery and the Founders, Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, and Gloria Brown Marshall, a professor of Constitutional Law at John J. College of Criminal Justice and author of The Constitution, Major Cases and Conflicts. Now let's hear from our panel. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much, Archivist David Ferriero, and thanks to all the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration. For a filmmaker like me, there's nothing better than spending an afternoon at the motion picture collections in College Park. It's like Christmas morning when I'm there. So I believe that the National Archives and all the people who work there are a national treasure, and I'm honored to be moderating this program today. So as the Archivist said, I'm the director of this series Confounding Father. It looks at the Constitution from the perspective of people who didn't like it in 1787. We all typically learn a story that praises the wisdom of the Framers, but many so-called anti-Federalists, they actually thought of themselves as the true Federalists, were very suspicious about what the Framers were up to. Some even thought the Philadelphia Convention was a counterrevolution designed to subdue democracy. As a filmmaker, I don't believe in telling people what they should think, so I interviewed a variety of scholars, some who don't agree with each other, and leave it up to the viewer to decide. And I hope this is a tool that can help people learn about a sometimes neglected perspective. So as I said, I'm a filmmaker, not a historian, so I'm very delighted to be joined by two of the scholars who appear in the film, Paul Finkelman and Gloria Brown-Marshall. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. So delighted to be here. So I'm not going to read your biographies. You'll know how to find out about you using the web. Over the next hour, I have several clips from the film to help stimulate our discussion. But before we move to slavery and the Constitutional Convention, I want to show the opening three minutes of Confounding Father to give a flavor of the series. And it starts with, as the archivist said, with part of a film called Your National Archives. And so why don't we show that clip. This building holds and trusts the records of the nation. It is the United States National Archives in Washington, DC. Here are preserved the documents most cherished by Americans, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. As they enter the stately exhibition hall, they see before them the bronze and marble shrine, which was especially built to display the three great charters that spell out the liberties enjoyed by all Americans. On the walls at either side of the shrine are two colorful murals. One shows Thomas Jefferson submitting the Declaration of Independence to John Hancock in the Continental Congress. The other shows James Madison of Virginia delivering the completed Constitution to George Washington, President of the Constitutional Convention. Someone says, Luther Martin, who was he, and they have no idea, how do you answer that? Well, you could answer it first by saying, do you mean Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism? The serious answer, of course, is that Luther Martin is a revolutionary patriot. He is a lawyer in Maryland. He is the Attorney General of Maryland for almost all of his adult life. He is a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He walks out of the convention because he doesn't like the way things are going. He was part of a small minority of contenders in 1787-88, who really did not like the Constitution at all. One I think does not deserve his obscurity. I think his most fascinating figures in early American politics, he spoke at great length, often with considerable vehemence and passion, against the Constitution. Nobody in 1776 even imagined a government as strong as the federal government that emerges ten years later. It's not in their wildest dreams. When you look at the U.S. Constitution, as it was created in 1787, there are no individual rights in that document. It's a relationship between the states and the federal government to a certain degree, to a certain degree, a very small degree, but basically it's the structure of the federal government itself. If you really value your freedoms, such as freedom of religion and gun rights and freedom of speech and no cool and unusual punishment, the people to thank for that are not the men who wrote the Constitution. The people to thank for that are the men who hated the Constitution. So that gives you a little flavor of the documentary. Paul Finkelman, I interviewed you quite a while ago, almost ten years ago, but you haven't changed at all. I had a hair in those days. I got the impression that you really are not a big fan of Luther Martin. Not really. I think he's something of a blowhard. He is not sober much of the time. And while I appreciate a drink with frequency, not when I'm going to a meeting, not when I'm going to be at a convention. In Madison's notes, Madison tries very hard to take good notes of speeches. And there are times when he simply writes some of Martin's speeches, and then he says, and he went on and on and on. He doesn't stop talking, and he keeps repeating himself. I also think that he wasn't particularly helpful in shaping the Constitution to be better. That is, I think the Constitution was a deeply pro-slavery document. And there are times when Luther Martin, who is a slave owner, nevertheless objects to certain of the pro-slavery provisions. But rather than shaping the Constitution as a voice from Maryland, which would have been very useful, he can't do that because he doesn't get along with anybody. That's ultimately the art of the possible, and I think Luther Martin was impossible. Well, I was kind of attracted to the idea of an anti-hero that everybody loves to hate, but that's not really our topic today. Gloria, I interviewed you a couple years ago, and you in that clip said that the Constitution, as a written, did not contain many individual rights or any individual rights. It was more a structure of government. Does that surprise people? I think it surprises people, and it's rather debatable. I know my colleague has mentioned about jury rights in Article III, but I don't think those are individual rights to a trial by jury. I think it's a division of power between the states and the Congress as to where those trials would take place because they speak of the trials being in the state and in the state wherein the crime had been committed. It doesn't really go to the individual's rights. So then put aside for the bill of rights, as we saw in 1791, but I still think it's primarily what is happening between the states and the federal government that set issue in their Constitution and what the structure of that federal government will be. So the beginning of that clip, the narrator of our National Archives says the three great charters that spell out the liberties enjoyed by all Americans. I understand that the archives is now reconsidering this, but what do you think about calling the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution the charters of freedom, Paul Finkelman? Well, I would urge the archives, and by the way, as you stated, the archives is wonderful. I have done much work in the archives. The archivists are fabulous. It is a shrine and a temple to scholars, and it is very important. And I love the archives. I hope the archives will consider adding the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which radically changed the Constitution in 1787 by not only ending slavery and guaranteeing that African-Americans will be citizens, but also by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and voting. Furthermore, I think they need to add the 19th Amendment, which guarantees that women have the right to vote. That is part of the Charter of Freedoms. You could go further. You could get rid of the amendment prohibiting the poll tax. I would add, I mean, if I were going to do a display, it would be a little bigger, I would add as a Charter of Freedom. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, because those are also fundamental aspects of our liberty and our freedom. And without them, we would not be the country we are today. Gloria, do you have anything to add to that? Or do you have an alternate name to Charter of Freedom? Yes, I would just call them the Founding Charters and leave it at that. And that way, we understand that they were groundbreaking. They lay the foundation. But when we add the word freedom, then we, of course, beg the question, freedom for whom? And so that's why I believe the Founding Charters would do just nicely. So I hope we can return to some contemporary issues later at the end of our discussion. But I'd like to move now to our main topic of slavery in the Constitutional Convention. And I have a clip for that. There's 13 chapters in the documentary series. They all are five to eight minutes. But the one on slavery is titled Compromises and Other Persons. And it ended up being the longest. It's 13 minutes long. I'm not going to show the whole thing. But I wanted to begin our discussion by showing the first three minutes of this chapter. So that's the second clip. Could you roll that now, Brian? No pain. And no pity. No pain. And no pity. And no pity. And no pity. Basically, all the delegates wanted the same thing. One nation with a strong central government. Now they realize that in order to create this, they would have to make concessions and compromises on the controversial issues. Not everybody is happy with all the compromises that they have made. Slavery is certainly one of those issues that they are going to debate here. And we'll divide the differences. It divides the rest of the country for decades to come. In the very first day of substantive debate, when Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia, introduces what's known as the Virginia Plan. The Virginia Plan says representation should be based on population. And immediately somebody suggests that they put the word free in front of population. And that leads to a debate. And they decide not to debate that any further that day. They debate how you count slaves for representation over and over and over again. There are long debates over slavery. There are vitriolic debates. There are nasty debates over slavery. When the textbooks talk about the constitutional convention, they do tend to focus on all of the disagreements and then the compromises that resolve those disagreements. And they tend to celebrate those compromises. Part of me says, well, that's a good idea. Let's teach kids to get along and not be fighting on the playground and all that. But some of those compromises are really ugly compromises, like the compromise that continued the slave trade for another 20 years and also allowed the Southerners to go up into the North and force the local authorities to help them recover their slaves when they ran away. That's a compromise in the less pleasant sense of the word compromise. What I find fascinating about the fugitive slave clause in the US Constitution is that most people don't know that they're the fugitive slave clause in the US Constitution. And that the same clause that speaks to the extradition of suspects from one state into another state in one paragraph, the next paragraph speaks to the extradition of human beings who have escaped slavery from one state to another state. So the compromise within the US Constitution in 1787 was that the slave holders who were in the room did not want to see their property diminished. There would be the ending of the slave trade in 1808, but slavery itself would continue as a business because they had invested so much in it. So what do you think of this notion of celebrating the compromises, either of you? Well, we've always been told, at least I have, that the Constitution was a compromise document and that we have framers of the Constitution because there's not one signatory who did everything. We know that James Madison is thought to be the father of the Constitution because he was a shepherd, but there's so much that is a part of compromise and the compromise on the backs of whom? Compromise on the backs of Native Americans, on African Americans, women, and even immigrants. This sense that the power elite is going to create a document that maintains a power elite, even if that structure is not a monarchy that they had escaped and fought against and won, but some other structure. So the fear then becomes, how do we create a structure? And actually, as everyone should know, that the Articles of Confederation were there first and they were initially supposed to be meeting to fix the Articles of Confederation that had given individual states so much power that there was no real country. It was a mixture of different semi sovereign states impeding on their power of economy, military, et cetera. And so all these things had to be part of a compromise. What the states gave up was part of a compromise, a larger compromise. So yes, in order to have the country we had today, there had to be compromises, but the question there remains on the backs of whom did we make these compromises? And that is why we're still in this quandary today with racial animosity and tensions because we made the backs of people of color and the economic power of the slave trade propel the country forward. And that was something the men in that room were willing to do, not all of them, but most of them. Paul Finkelman? Well, I think everything Gloria said is true. There are compromises and some of them are very ugly as Woody Holton said. The other thing is, is that if you look at the debates at the convention and you look at the way the convention flows, there were many opportunities to end up with different results. The most dramatic one is the slave trade division. Everybody at the convention assumes that Congress, once it has the power to regulate commerce, will probably ban the slave trade. At the time, every single one of the states, all 13 of them, including South Carolina and Georgia, have prohibited the importation of new slaves from Africa, either directly by banning the importation or by providing import taxes that were so high that nobody could possibly afford to buy a slave from Africa. Given that that's the state of the country in 1787, when South Carolinians demand that the slave trade be protected from the commerce clause, the rest of the delegates could have gotten up and saying, look, you guys aren't importing slaves, George is not importing slaves, we're not going to protect it. And what's fascinating about the debate is is nobody at the convention suggests the constitution ban the African slave trade. But when the Pythnes from South Carolina get up and demand protection for the slave trade, they say, if you ban the slave trade, we won't sign this constitution. But the fact is no one's suggesting they ban the slave trade, they are only suggesting that Congress can regulate international commerce. And so the Pythnes completely shift the debate to are you gonna ban the slave trade or not, rather than what is really going on, are you going to give the slave trade specific protection that no other kind of commerce gets? And I think, you know, when the South Carolinians say, we might not sign the constitution, if you ban the slave trade, the delegates should have said, we're not banning the slave trade, we're not saying anything about the slave trade, we will leave that to Congress. And you know, something George in South Carolina surrounded by the Spanish in Florida, surrounded by many very powerful Native American nations having suffered through British occupation of Charleston, you two guys wanna go it alone, go it alone, see how long you're gonna survive. But nobody wants to call their bluff. The thing that I find most interesting about the politics of the convention is that most of the Southerners are united in protecting slavery. The slave trade is different because the Virginia delegation is opposed to it and some Marylanders like Luther Martin are opposed to it. But at the rest of the debates on slavery, the Southerners form a united front, knowing we are gonna get this come hell or high water. And the Northerners sort of are bullied, you know, they're pushed around because they don't have a focus on this even though by this time, two states, Massachusetts and New Hampshire have ended slavery and three states, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania are in the process of ending slavery and everybody expects New York and New Jersey to do the same which they will in the next 15 years. So it's a kind of an asymmetrical debate and it's an asymmetrical use of power. But Matt, may I add two points? One of them being international pressure because we have leaders who have traveled abroad to France, to England and when they were ambassadors before the tensions and then after the tensions as well. And so in England, we have a major debate, we have a withdrawal of England and it's of course the Great Britain and the powers around to say we're gonna change this whole dynamic when it comes to the slave trade. And for many people is not as economically viable as it was before. We have Wilberforce and others and later on the Stuart case and Somerset, Stuart versus Somerset and these cases take an international dynamic to what we look at as basically domestic economic issues and pressure. We have France for example and later on we began to see in the later part of the 1700s where we have of course the best deals attacks and the French people rise up but French keeps slavery. And so we're in this pressure situation in which England bans the slave trade in 1807 and this whole sense that in the future slavery is going to die out but not now. The economy is based on the slave trade not just holding slaves, selling slaves what the slaves produce and Wall Street that's what's gonna be Wall Street as we know it better. So people are making too much money there's no economy engine or economic engine there's no other economy to replace it yet. And so they don't wanna start a new nation begin a new government and not have an economic engine because then they'll fall and be taken over by an outside party. So in many ways they believe the compromise and even the second part is the word persons. The word slave is not used in the body of the constitution. It's only used one time and that's in the 14th amendment. So what we have are persons. So I always knew in a compromised document compromises between whom? I knew there had to be people in that convention men who stood up and said no, their voices were small but that's always been the case in this country. There are always been white men who have stood up for what was right but the number has always been so blasted small but that voice was there and that's why there are people who said I'm not signing on to a constitution in which we declare our freedom to England and then turn around and use slave in the constitution. So even though we know by gentlemen's agreement that the word person is referring to enslaved Africans they're using the word person as opposed to slave. So that was another compromise in this document. So we just talked about the slave trade and let's go back to the end of the first clip I showed you talked about the fugitive slave clause. What, tell us a little bit more about the fugitive slave clause as a and how it got into the constitution. Well, you know, as Paul pointed out we had people with deep interests who wanted to protect those interests and we have to think about the compromises between those northern states where they were already moving inching toward an industrial revolution but what we need to think about is that as they moved away from the slave trade they had other things they wanted to barter. They wanted to make sure that they were dealing and had the freedom to deal with commerce and with the types of commerce that were viable and valuable to them in the north. And so when we have this economy of the slave trade in the south which is their engine that made them a world trade I mean a world class trader and goods and then we have the north so we have a bartering system and once again we compromise based on the backs of whom? Based on the backs of people of color and so the south gets its protection of any slaves running to the north and have to be brought back and the north gets its protection as it goes and approaches into more of inner state commerce. Kyle Finkelman what did these fugitive slave clause actually do in the constitution? Well initially it does almost nothing. The clause is introduced very, very late at the convention and again I think this is another one of these compromises that didn't have to be made because it is not central to the southern positions. It's introduced very late in August and when it is introduced it's basically laughed down by northerners when Charles Pinkley of South Carolina and Pierce Butler of South Carolina say that fugitive slaves should be delivered up like criminals. Roger Sherman sarcastically says he saw no more propriety in the public seizing and surrounding a slave or a servant than a horse and he's not comparing black people to horses. What he's saying is if you can't control your property that's your problem, not our problem and we're not gonna spend our time and money hunting down your slaves. Eventually they come up with a compromise with language as Gloria pointed out. People don't know what the clause is there because the clause is almost impossible to understand. Let me read it for you because it's truly a marvel of circumlocution. No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation they're in be discharged from such service or labor but shall be delivered up on the claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. I mean, you basically have to be a legal scholar of some sort and a good historian to understand what they're talking about. I mean, it almost sounds like, you know if a hockey player is playing for the New York Rangers he can't decide to go play for the Boston Bruins because he's got a contract for service or labor. And of course it doesn't mean any of that. Nobody has any idea how it will operate. There's also fascinating no direct grant of power to Congress to even enforce it. This is in one of the few places in the Constitution where there's absolutely no power granted to Congress to regulate. This is in article four, section two there are three clauses and in none of them is Congress given the power to regulate or enforce these provisions. So I think the Northerners think, well this is a throwaway, you know it's never gonna happen. And what's weird about it, it says the person shall be delivered up on claim. Doesn't say who's supposed to deliver it. The Southerners I think have in their mind my slave will run from Virginia to Pennsylvania and some Pennsylvania will grab my slave and use my slave as his slave. And then I'm gonna go to that person and he has to deliver up my slave back to me just as if my horse ran away he'll ride my horse. And what the Southerners don't get is that when African Americans run away from bondage in the South they're not going to be enslaved in the North they're going to become free people. And it is really not until the 1830s and beyond that the issue of fugitive slaves becomes a major issue in American culture. And that is in part because of the development of steamboats and railroads. So that slaves are actually running away in large numbers. And then you get enormous controversies. You get a few Supreme Court decisions you get a lot of lower court decisions you get riots in the North as people try to protect fugitives from being returned to the South. You get Southerners ranting in Congress that you Northerners are not fulfilling your obligation under the Constitution. And many Northerners say we don't have any obligation. We don't know who delivered up means. This is a very vague clause. You didn't write a very good clause. But in the end Congress in 1793 easily and in 1850 very difficultly passed fugitive slave laws. And this ties to of course one other major pro-slavery position which is the three-fifths clause which enhances. Let me just stop you there with three-fifths clause because I wanted to show a clip where you explain that and then we'll come back and talk about it. Is that or did I interrupt your thought? So do you want me to explain it and then you'll show up a quick? No, I'll show the clip first and then you can add to it. I just want to tie it to how the fugitive slave law of 1850 gets passed and go ahead. All right, so the next clip is number three and in this begins with historian Murray Dry. It has Murray Builder in it and Paul Finkelman then describes one of the unintended consequences of the three-fifths clause which was that all these Virginians got elected president but could you roll number three please? What the framers could do and did do It's about two minutes was to limit slave importation to 20 years and to use circumlocution so that the constitution does not include the word slave or slavery. What they couldn't do and they've been criticized for this and I think unfairly is to have eliminated slavery, then there's no union. No union, what does that do? That doesn't help. It was not inevitable to be sure the constitution would not have abolished slavery but I believe that the multiple protections for slavery were not foreordained. Madison was so obsessed with winning proportional representation in both branches in Congress that he was willing to sacrifice the future of nearly three quarters of a million people held as property, about 20% of the population of the United States. In the debate over how to choose the president James Madison says the fittest thing that is the most appropriate thing would be for the people to elect the president and then he says but if that happens our Negroes won't count. Of course what he means by our Negroes won't count is the slaves aren't gonna vote. Virginia is the largest state in the country by population but 40% of the population are slaves and so if you can't fold the slaves into the election of the president Virginia won't get to elect its presidents. So you get the electoral college which is made up by giving electors based on the number of representatives in Congress you have and the number of representatives in Congress is based on the three fifths clause and so when you get to say the crucial presidential election of 1800 Jefferson is elected president because of the electors created by the three fifths clause. If there had been no slaves counted for purposes of representation Jefferson would not have been elected president in 1800. And it's clear it's open Madison says it people say it all the time. So for people who don't really know the three fifths clause and I'm sure there's a lot of myths and misinformation about it out there where did it originate? So under the Articles of Confederation each state had one vote in Congress and therefore population did not affect the representation in Congress. In the new constitution representation will be based on population and the great debate which takes up a significant portion of the convention is how you calculate that population. All of the Northerners say you calculate the population based on the free people in the society whether they are voters or children or non-voters or immigrants. It doesn't matter because all three people are going to be represented in Congress. So you count up all the free people you figure out how many people you need for one representative and then you figure out how many representatives each state gets. The Southerners say, wait a minute. Our slaves constitute an important part of our society and we should count them for purposes of representation. And by the way, during the revolution taxes and military support for the revolutionary army how many soldiers you had to send to the army was based on population. And in those debates, the Southerners said slaves are property, you can't count them. You can't tax us for our slaves because they're not people, they're property. And then if they get to the Constitutional Convention they're, oh, well, we didn't mean that. We know that slaves are people, count them for representation. And by the way, we don't mind if you count them for taxation because they understand that there's probably never gonna be a head count tax and there never is. So that's the debate. Ultimately they settle on three fifths based on a previous calculation that slaves produce about as much wealth as three fifths of a free working person. Economists, by the way, today think that's a pretty good calculation. There are some economists who point out, for example, that a male slave in 1860 produced X amount of cotton. And when that person was free and working for himself he produced two fifths more cotton. So there's actually, these people even though they don't have economists and mathematicians to help them they have a pretty good understanding of the economics of it. So they demand and they get that representation will be based on the whole number of free people excluding Indians who are not within the society that is so the Iroquois living out, say, where Syracuse is are not gonna be counted because first of all, no census taker is probably gonna wanna go out there and count them. And, but if Indians are in the cities like Albany or New York, then they will be counted. And three fifths of all other persons the other persons are slaves. Now, what this means of course is is that free people who are African American will be counted fully for purposes of representation. What it does is dramatically increase the power of Southern white voters because they are getting to elect more people with fewer votes than their Northern counterparts. What I was gonna say about the fugitive slave clause is this that when the 1850 fugitive slave laws passed it is only possible to pass it because of the bonus that the South gets in Congress by counting slaves for purposes of representation. Same thing for the Missouri compromise in 1820 same thing for the Kansas Nebraska Act that is all of the pro-slavery legislation gets through with the solid South and some Northerners who will support them without that bonus it won't happen. And here's the great irony after the Civil War and all of the enslaved people are now free they count as whole-purpose for purposes of representation. And so the traitorous Southern states who have cost at least 630,000 lives on both sides and maybe more they now get more representation in Congress than they had before their treason. And that is why it's important to put in the 14th amendment to clause which says if you don't allow former slaves to vote on the same basis as other people you're gonna we're gonna reduce your congressional representation but Congress never has the guts to do that. And that's again a failure of future politics beyond this debate. So the three-fifths clause also as I said in the clip affects the electoral college. Right. Probably Martin Van Buren is elected because of the three-fifths clause as well as Jefferson. So Gloria, you touched on this before but I've always find it just dumb-founding to understand why the Northern states would go along with this. I mean, couldn't they see that they were giving the South much more power than they really should have had in the beginning? What was, and as Mary Builder point out it continued to affect our politics and as Paul just said all the way up through the Civil War why did they go along with this? I think that when we start talking as Paul pointed out these political compromises that the North was willing to do and they were I will put it this way. Some of this is being strong-armed and the North was still building. I mean intellectually the North was of course at a higher level than the Southern states but economically they were still finding their way. The South was an economic powerhouse and I've said this many times and I'll say it again. You take free land, you take people, kidnap them under a penalty of death, pass laws and through violence, say these people must work for you for free and of course you can build a mighty internationally renowned economy and that's what the South had more so than the North did. I also want to raise something else that goes back to the three fifths rule found in article one paragraph two and that is they then tied into the population. The three fifths of Africans as they were counted for the purpose of deciding how many representatives would be in Congress but also the indentured servant. The indentured servants were poor whites who were bound under contract to work for free sometimes referred to as white slaves. Now they had no true freedom but they added to the count and so when you started thinking about the indentured servants who were many of whom were in the South you then again build on the number as far as the South is concerned. I want to connect to something that's happening today in the three fifths rule. We think about the Africans who are enslaved, human beings who are enslaved, their numbers being used for political expediency. Of course, no politician is going to ask these enslaved people how can we best represent their interests in Congress? So they're being used the same way the incarcerated are used today. So you have people who are incarcerated in prisons outside of major areas many some inside of major towns and cities but most of them are outside in rural places where those people in those rural jurisdictions enjoy the increased population because of the incarcerated which then brings to them state, local and federal funds based on their population count. So you have something very similar happening today where you have people who are counted in order to determine the number of U.S. representatives in Congress but at the same time those people who are being counted have no voice in their own government. They are not being asked what is necessary to best represent them and so the use of people of color again then as now for political expediency continues. The three fifth rule in its own 21st century version continues. So what we've seen then we're seeing now why do people go along with it now because they never know when they could be on the losing end. People always assume at some point it's going to work for me if I just use this process at some point it will work for me. So why wouldn't you have more of the cities saying to the rural areas in state government we don't want to have you choose to have our people who are from many of them from the cities who are incarcerated in rural places counted within your rural population. Why don't more leaders in the cities now stand up to their rural leaders, political counterparts. We don't see it today and we really didn't see them stand up the way they should have stood up back then either. So I have a short just one minute clip that touches on what you're just talking about that I'd like to show because it's on this concept of whiteness and then the other in order for whiteness to exist and this is something that you talked about. So it's clip number four. Brian could you roll clip number four and then we'll talk about it. And without the three fifths clause and the rise of the Southern slave power and national politics, our entire national history would be different. In the 1790s, the slave states gained 10 or 11 extra seats because of this compromise. In the 1830s, they had 24 additional seats because of this compromise. And the rationalization for slavery continuing and for the compromise to allow slavery to continue is based on what we're still dealing with today, which is a nation of disparate backgrounds and religions and beliefs brought together in a way that coalesces around whiteness. And one way for whiteness to actually have a reality to it is to have blackness, is to have people of color, is to have the other. And so the xenophobia has been a part of the beginning of this nation. So could you expand on that a little bit, how this idea of whiteness needs blackness? Well, if you think about it from the beginning with the Portuguese going to Andongo, which is renamed by the Portuguese Angola, under an edict by the Pope that says that any heathens can be oppressed and subjugated into servitude. And then this religious sense that based on their lack of souls, that they have to work out their sins, whether or not that's a sin based on the Ham story that Ham saw as father's nakedness or the slain of King by Abel. The whole sense is that slain of Abel by King, but the whole sense of this is that we are a nation in which people of color, especially Africans and Native Americans are being suppressed and oppressed to get what they want, the labor from the Africans and the intellectual property of the Africans and the land from the Native Americans. And then excuses, rationalizations keep getting created in order for greed to win the day and the economic system to continue on the backs of Native Americans and African Americans. And so what better distinctive way to be able to show the other than by skin color? Initially it was by the soullessness, but then African Americans, even some Native Americans began to convert to Christianity. Before that it was like, you know, well they come from another continent, but now we've been here generation after generation. The color of the skin becomes this indelible way to show the other. And so what better way than not only to make an other but to give rise to the Christianity, the sense of the higher soul of whites and then to be able to point out those people who should be and continue to be oppressed. We have the sense by 2040 that this country is gonna be majority people of color. The Native Americans pointed out the country was majority people of color when the Europeans arrived. And in order to fend off this sense of being a minority in this country, they have to keep creating whiteness and versions of whiteness. So we have ethnic groups, we have religious groups converting over to whiteness. So they're no longer their religion, they are now white. You know, the Irish used to be considered people of color in a way, a version of people of color. Now they're white. So these other groups are subsumed into whiteness. And in order to prove their whiteness, they have to prove it by showing just how white they are by continuing to debase and oppress people who are of color. And so as we go forward even today, the vestiges and remnants of what we're living with from that time period is that we have to have the subjugated class. And the subjugated class by race is the best way to depict that other class. As long as people can be a part of whiteness, then you have to have something that brings the country together, especially a country as diverse as this one. And one of the ways that you're talking about the founders and the framers of the constitution as well as the founders and the Declaration of Independence was to get away from religious conflict. They knew that in other parts of the world, religious conflict tore apart nations. So they went out of their way to stop any, or if they could, as best they could, religious conflict. They took away religious tests or anything like that. But what they figured was that this whiteness is the supreme people that God created to control this land. And we have to control whiteness by keeping whiteness sacred. And then even in the 1600s making it against the law because these are majority lawyers that we have, we're dealing with, make it against the law for whites and blacks to marry, or Native Americans and Europeans to marry, to make that against the law so that we don't then dilute the whiteness. And so maintaining the sanctity of whiteness means you always have to have this evil, this thing that's bad. And that would be the people of color, in particular the African Americans and Native Americans. And then later on in the 1800s, the Asian Americans. So Paul Finkelman, does the 1787 constitution unwittingly or otherwise promote white supremacy? Actually, I think it simply observes what has already happened. That is to say, yes, it promotes slavery wittingly. And to the extent that promoting slavery is promoting white supremacy, it is promoting white supremacy. If we look at the history of slavery, slavery is found on every continent, in almost every culture, as the great scholar of slavery, Orlando Patterson pointed out, almost everybody on the earth today is the descendant of either a slave or a slaveholder. And I would add, or possibly both, that is we find slavery in every part of the world and it's accepted. What makes the new world slavery different is that it is the first time in the world when slavery becomes based on what we call race. So that color and ethnicity, external observation of other people become the test for whether you are enslaveable or not. And so initially Native Americans are enslaveable. They're brought back to Spain as slaves, but Spain has slavery from everywhere. Slave has Arabs as slaves, Spain has white Christians as slaves, Spain has Sub-Saharan Africans as slaves. So slavery is all over the Mediterranean. In fact, the word slave comes from the word sloth because in the post-Roman world, the majority of the slaves in the Mediterranean were people from Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania who were being brought to the Mediterranean by Viking slave traders. So slave trading is everywhere all the time. And there's a vigorous cross Mediterranean slave trade between Muslim Arab North Africa and white Christian Europe. And slaves are going back and forth all the time. But when you get to America, there isn't initially Native Americans are enslaved. It doesn't work very well for the slave owners for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Native Americans are able to simply escape by running away into non-white settlement. They know the turf better than the whites do, but Africans don't, Africans are easily brought in. And so very quickly, we become an Afrocentric slave society. And only people of African ancestry become enslaveable. And once that happens, again, it moves along fine until you get to the revolution. When the revolution says all men are created equal and we're all endowed, we are all endowed with rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then how do you justify owning slaves? Well, you do justify it by creating an intellectual and cultural ideology that says, well, some people are different than others. Some people are not, in a sense, ever going to be equal. They may be morally equal. Most slave owners baptize their slaves, in part because it's easier to control people if they're involved in religion, but also because they believe they have souls and they should go to heaven. But they're lesser people. They're slave owners say they are perpetual children. They can never be equal to me. Thomas Jefferson writes eloquently about, in a very horrible manner, he writes eloquently about how blacks are simply inferior to whites. And so it's okay to hold them as slaves. And that is developing even before the constitution is written. Jefferson is ironically the person who gives us the language we're all created equal, we're all entitled to liberty. And then a few years later becomes the first person I've been able to determine in the Western world to write a pseudoscientific argument in favor of enslaving blacks. So Jefferson both creates liberty and creates a racist argument based on science, based on observation, as he does it, to prove it's okay to enslave blacks. His science is nonsense. His observations are nonsense, but it takes hold. And of course they are supported constantly by all of the major churches, all of the big religions buy into slavery because slavery has always been consistent with biblical analysis. But this type of slavery is different. And that's as I have to make this note. People kept their religion, they kept their names for the most part, they even had their families intact. The difference with English slavery was to create people as property, to actually have them as commerce, to take away their names, to take away their religions, to sell on the auction blocks their children, to breed them the way the Europeans did, the way the English, the way white Americans did. That is the anathema to any type of true Christian belief. That's not the way slavery worked in the Bible, new and Old Testament. That's not the way that slavery worked around the world and other places. This was a conscious cold blooded commerce that the United States created in its slavery and as the institution and in its slave trade that made it different from the way that slavery had been in place in many parts of the world over a millennia. So we're almost out of time. I wanna show one final clip. It's number five, which is the end of the chapter on slavery. And then we'll have a minute or two to summarize. So could you roll clip number five, Brian? These debates are very open. Slavery is everywhere. On the very last day of the convention, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts says, I will not sign this constitution because of the three fifths clause. And George Mason of Virginia, who owns a couple hundred slaves, but who opposes importing more from Africa. Mason says I will not sign this because of the clause allowing the African slave trade. In Western Virginia, where there's not a lot of slavery, one of the anti-Federalists attacks the slave trade provision. And he says, this is a wonderful clause for an Algerian constitution. Of course, this is the Barbary pirates who are enslaving American sailors captured in the Southern Mediterranean. He says, it's a wonderful clause for an Algerian constitution, but not so well suited for our latitude. I think that there were those within that room in 1787 who knew that slavery was wrong. When people say that that's what everyone was doing, that's not the case. There were always people fighting against slavery. Those people who were slave masters in the 1787 meeting had an economic rationalization, a religious rationalization. They had a social rationalization. These people should not be in our same sight in society. As they were Africans serving them food and cleaning their houses and nursing their babies and some of them sleeping with them on the side, you know, all of this was taking place. So the rationalization that was needed in order to create a country has been a rationalization that has been used going into the Civil War, coming out of the Civil War. We have to pull a nation together. How do we do that? We pull the North and South together by removing the troops and saying that the other, those Native Americans and those Africans, we're coming together as a nation of whites and they're on the outside the other. We see it happen time and time again in this nation. As long as we keep the foundation of our business system strong, we shall be able to maintain and improve the way of life our forefathers conceived and established. So you each only have about a minute. Unfortunately, I wanted to talk about this more, but what do you, so, you know, I couldn't find films that mentioned slavery during the Cold War and even later, but how do we, how are we doing now at teaching what we're talking about today? When you have laws against teaching critical race theory, there are laws in certain states right now that would prohibit this conversation we're having because people have bought into this idea of whiteness and purity and that their ancestors could never have possibly have done these horrific things, you know, pass laws and use violence. What we saw on January 6th, that was what used to happen in lynch mobs in this country on a regular basis. So to be able to stay in the mindset of the purity of the founders of this country and the purity of those founding documents, we have to lie to ourselves again and again that this behavior, the economy, the greed, the need to build a nation on the backs of African-American men, women and children and Native American land is something that this country will keep embracing with schizophrenia at the same time that it's waving a flag and talking about liberty and justice for all. And until this country, as other countries have, owns its past and realizes with Sankofa provisions that we have to know the past to gain some insight into the present and plan for a more just future. And we have to do that. And hopefully at some point, young people will drive this to truth. I know older people sometimes want to, but I think they do it only in inches at a time. So hopefully America will do better than it's doing now because we certainly can. We have to grow up and embrace what has happened and take the blinders off and realize that we can't go forward in this crippled manner emotionally and historically crippled. Paul Finkelman, you're the president of Gratz College. How are we doing it at teaching this subject in your view? Well, I mean, my college has an online PhD in Holocaust and genocide studies. We teach about world genocide. We teach about the Holocaust. I teach a course on world slavery as a component of both genocide and the Holocaust since there were millions of people enslaved in Germany during World War II. We are doing better than we were. It is impossible, for example, for me to imagine the National Archives sponsoring this program 40 years ago. I just gave a lecture at Monticello. The first time I went to Monticello and I simply asked the guide where the slave quarters were in relation to the house. The guide yelled at me about trying to destroy the reputation of a great man, Thomas Jefferson. In this time, the guide spends a great deal of time talking about Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings and the children he had with Sally Hemings. And the guide talks about the importance of the enslaved people at Monticello. We are better than we were. The statue of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are no longer in Richmond. I mean, I think these are important steps, but are we where we want to be? Of course not. And will there be people who don't want to get to where we need to get? Of course not. I mean, what I think the United States needs and I don't see it happening, but there are lots of things that never saw happening. I would have never imagined Barack Obama or Kamala Harris being a president or vice president. So things do change. But I would love to see the United States have a cultural truth and reconciliation commission, a cultural event across the nation where we investigate our past, where we confront our past, where we understand how we got to where we are. And in the process, help people understand where we are today. I've taught in Gratz College in Greater Pennsylvania, but I've taught in Texas, I've taught in Louisiana, I've taught in North Carolina, I've taught in Virginia, I've taught in Oklahoma and in Florida, all of which are Southern states, segregating states. I would often get students who'd ask me something about, should they feel guilty because their ancestor owned slaves where their ancestors fought for the Confederacy? And my answer was always, you are not responsible for what your ancestors did. You weren't alive, you aren't responsible. However, you are responsible for cleaning up the mess they left you. And I think that as an educator, as a historian, as sometimes a law professor, as a college leader, I see that we need to do a lot better and a lot more education. And we're better than we were and we're not nearly where I think we have to be. That's gonna have to be the last word because we're out of time. But I'm very indebted to both of you for participating in the documentary and for joining us today. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I also thank the staff of the National Archives. As I said before, it's a great national treasure for inviting us to this program and for the invaluable work that they do every day for all the American people. Thank you all. Thank you.