The Status of Slavery Prior to the Civil War

The Declaration of Independence holds it a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." At the time of the American Founding, however, this proclamation of the desirability of unalienable rights for all men was clearly inconsistent with the enslavement of an entire race of men in the Southern states.

The Founders, recognizing the tension, deliberately omitted mention of the word "slavery" in the Constitution so as not to give the impression that the Constitution explicitly championed the practice, instead of tolerating it as a necessary evil. Where slaves were mentioned, as in the slave importation clause, the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifth clause, and Article V, they were euphemistically referred to as "other persons," implying that the Founders did unequivocally recognize the slaves' humanity.

Both Abraham Lincoln in his speech on the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and John Calhoun, in his 1838 speech on the issue, give the same account of the Founders' views on slavery; while slavery could be tolerated for the time being as a necessary evil, the Founders expected and wanted it to eventually die out. The Founders were willing to allow slavery to persist where it already was so as not to engender disunity and political fractiousness, but they also endeavored to obstruct its spread-for example through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which forbade slavery in the Northwest territories. The first act of the U. S. Congress was to reaffirm this Ordinance and its prohibition. While Lincoln and Calhoun hold diametrically opposite views as to slavery's desirability, their accounts of the Founders' views are extremely similar.