…or what about slavery?
This always strikes me as one of the more illogical ad hominem arguments against the Founders.
11 thoughts on “The Liberty Constitution”
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…or what about slavery?
This always strikes me as one of the more illogical ad hominem arguments against the Founders.
Comments are closed.
A liberty movement that makes no distinctions between who and who are not worthy of it, has yet to occur. In the parlance of the Constitution it was clearly the term “citizen” which allowed slavery to continue. The arguments for and against slavery were essentially just the Federalist vs Anti-Federalist arguments continued. No-one suggested that the question of citizenship itself (whether it be state or federal) was the issue and that, fundamentally, is the problem.
Nowadays, there’s a widespread view that the Constitution protects the rights of foreigners, when they’re in the United States. For example, it’s widely believed that the police have no more right to warrantless search of a foreigner than they do of a citizen. This would have seemed absurd to most everyone a hundred years ago. This is not to be confused with the inexplicable belief that some Americans have that their Constitutional rights are somehow relevant when they’re dealing with foreign police forces on foreign soil.
Nowadays, there’s a widespread view that the Constitution protects the rights of foreigners, when they’re in the United States.
Look at the actual wording. From the Fourth Amendment:
It doesn’t say “citizen”. It says “people” without qualification (such as in the main body of the Constitution, “People of the United States” or “People of the several states”).
If you’re going to use that logic, you’re arguing that the founders didn’t consider slaves as people, unless these provisions also applied to them.
Actually that line of thought led to some really interesting court cases, and many Southern courts had to do some really crazy legal maneuvers to try and argue that black slaves weren’t “people”. It seems that some of the Constitutional wording was a ticking time bomb on slavery, showing up later when some Southern states tried to ban slaves from carrying guns. It may strike people as odd, but for a long time slaves could have firearms, because hunting was an good way to put meat on the table, and why would a slave owner spend all day hunting when he had slaves that could do it for him? As time went on the Southern slave owners became more paranoid and their state governments moved to deny slaves access to arms, and some of their state supreme courts issued some rather bizarre but predictable rulings, having to determine that black people aren’t actually people people, while other courts basically hid in the woods and hoped the whole thing would blow over.
That’s because in the Founders day ships from Europe were arriving daily, and people who arrive on ships are good people, willing to help with the rigging or man the pumps. But now people arrive in planes, and a lot of them are pretty sketchy (Yeah, I’m looking at you in seat 15E). Should Constitutional protections extend to people whose only hardship in getting here was having to watch Shrek 2 as the in-flight movie and suffer through a limit of two mini-whiskey bottles and a Coke? I don’t think so, and I don’t think Thomas Jefferson would agree, were the transit described to him.
Perhaps if he was still with us and forced to watch Shrek 2 and feast on the veritable banquet slapped down on his tray table he might feel differently, but he is not with us anymore and we can’t base law on his hypothetical reaction to an in-flight meal, which wouldn’t be good jurisprudence.
So I contend that all new foreigners are suspect because all foreigners are suspicious, if not downright weird. A lot of controversy swirled around whether Obama’s birth certificate showed that he was born outside America. Well, let me tell you, ALL the foreigners who have birth certificates have ones that show they were born outside America. The rest of the foreigners come from places that don’t even issue birth certificates, and why should the United States extend Constitutional protections to anyone whose very birth is uncertified? For all we know they were actually aborted and somehow survived the trip into the sewers, grew up into some kind of mutant Ninja, and now claim rights that we don’t extend to any aborted native unborn fetuses, who have no Constitutional rights, as is quite well established in numerous court cases.
So if fetuses don’t have Constitutional rights, why should somewhat older foreign fetuses have such rights, just because they somehow survived Shrek 2 and made it over here? Oh, I tell you, I just get so worked up over it. There are unaborted foreign fetuses taking advantage of us every day and we don’t do anything about it. They aren’t people, they’re just tissue that matured for a bit. Sure, sometimes they take the shape of South African Victoria Secret super models, but they are tissue just the same.
This puts native born Americans in the awkward position of having to recognize Victoria Secret super models as human beings endowed with the full panoply of Constitutional protections, and I’m pretty darn sure that Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln didn’t such babes in mind when they said a bunch of important stuff they said, which escapes me at the moment or I’d provide a quote, but you already know whatever quote I would cite from some circulating Internet meme that has it plastered on a picture of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Churchill, or some other famous US President.
This always strikes me as one of the more illogical ad hominem arguments against the Founders.
Since I don’t consider moral codes to be fixed, I agree, but I thought you were opposed to “moral relativism”?
My point has nothing to do with moral relativism. It’s about the logical fallacy of ad hominem. The Constitution stands on its own, regardless of the morals of its authors.
Someone at VC asked if the Southern states were “somehow tricked” into signing an anti-slavery document. I answered:
“People are often tricked by the law of unintended consequences.
“The key to said consequences is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration asserts that the Crown had violated certain unalienable rights, with such volume and frequency as to authorize the American colonists to secede from Britain and establish themselves as an independent nation. If the highest law in the land is not authorized to prohibit free trade or to suspend local and regional governments, what authority gives an individual more power over his labor than a king has over his subjects?
“One may argue that since the Constitution distinguishes between persons and citizens, slaves were not citizens and thus not protected by the Privileges and Immunities clause. But that misses the big picture. The Bill of Rights explicitly applies to “the people” or “persons” or an unspecified party (e.g. the Eighth Amendment). The Ninth Amendment protects “rights…retained by the people. ” Foremost of those rights would be those addressed by the founding legal document – including the rights to government by consent and to freedom of trade.”
Off topic, if there is a constitutional right to “Trade with all parts of the world,” that’s a knife in the groins of protectionists and Marxists. (To state what should be obvious, “all parts of the world” includes ours – the Declaration via the 9th Amendment upholds the right to both foreign and domestic commerce.
Some of the Founders owned slaves and some didn’t. There were compromises during the constitutional convention on the issue, including the often misunderstood counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person clause.
I’ve found that the people who make the biggest noise about some of the Founders owning slaves have little interest in liberty or having a truly free society.
The whole denigration of Jefferson on the topic of slavery and the Declaration doesn’t make much sense to me, given that in his initial draft included this clause (before slaveholding colonies objected to its inclusion and effected its removal from the final Declaration):
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in an other hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of an other.
Regardless of whether or not he owned slaves during his lifetime, he was not a supporter of the practice. Based on some of his other writing on the topic of slavery, I’d say his view on African slaves isn’t significantly different than those of Democrat party of today regarding blacks. Mostly a view that they deserve freedom but are constitutionally unable to integrate into a civilized society without paternalistic assistance. It was racist twaddle then, and worse racist twaddle now. He at least had the excuse that his experiences were limited to interactions with persons who were essentially tribalist barbarians who were orders of magnitude less civilized and learned. Racists/Democrats today don’t have that excuse.