What were the constitutional debates over slavery before the Civil War?

0:04[MUSIC] When you're talking about ending slavery, and Americans added the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, it was the culmination of an extraordinary national debate that had started decades before, really at the point of the American Revolution. Slavery existed in the American colonies like it existed throughout North America. You had slavery as a practice of some of the Native American tribes, you had slavery as a practice of the Spanish governments that were here and there throughout North America. You also had slavery as a matter of British policy in all 13 of the original colonies that became the United States of America. It wasn't until the revolution that Americans were finally free to decide whether or not they wanted to continue slavery. At the point of the Revolution, when we successfully broke away from and instead of 13 colonies, they now became 13 free and independent states.

1:04At that point, each of the states made a decision for itself as to whether or not it was going to continue the practice of chattel slavery. What is chattel slavery? Why do I use that term? Chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is a term that just generally denotes treating a person as if they were a piece of property. No rights whatsoever. No matter how abused or killed or controlled or constrained.

1:30No matter what happens to you, you are not treated as a person who can go to a court of law and seek protection. You're owned and any of your children are owned. This is Chattel slavery. Again, it was British policy. After the Revolution, the Northern states immediately began to move in the direction of abolition. It started in Vermont. It's going to quickly go to Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and New York. The Northern states moved in the direction of freedom and ending slavery. Meanwhile, the Southern states continued the practice of Chattel slavery. We very quickly became a regionally divided country on whether or not it was appropriate to hold a person as a piece of property. In the North, freedom was especially entrenched through the Northwest ordinance that said that slavery shall not exist in the territory

2:26except as punishment for a crime after due process of law. Those words were drafted by Thomas Jefferson, and they prevented slavery from being a part of the territory which ultimately became, I don't know, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Illinois. All of those states came out of the Northwest territory, and from the very beginning, they were bound by the language of Thomas Jefferson to ban slavery. The country then engages in decades of increasingly antagonistic and violent debate over the subject of slavery with abolitionists in the North increasingly demanding the end of slavery. That slavery is a violation of natural rights declared in the Declaration of independence. That it was a denial of due process of law. That even if Southern states remain free to continue slavery, at the very least, we should end slavery in any new state entering into the Union and abolish it in any territory,

3:28including the District of Columbia. In the meantime, the South after the invention of the cotton gin and the wealth that could be accumulated by plantation owners, if they used slave labor. In the South, the Southern plantation economies increasingly used slavery and increasingly demanded that the rest of the country respect slavery. They demanded that new states be allowed to have slavery. They demanded that Northern states return, anyone who has escaped from slavery. This political fight grew more and more heated and more and more regionally divided between the North and the South. Finally, just in the 1850s, you saw the rise of the first political party that was devoted to abolition and to the end of slavery. This was the Republican Party. The Republicans that eventually who are going to put up Abraham Lincoln as their choice,

4:26their candidate for president. Republicans said we're devoted to the end of slavery. Southern states, you can continue to have it, but northern states should not have to return anyone who has escaped from slavery. No territory should violate anyone's due process, so slavery should be abolished in the territories. It was the responsibility of the federal government to ensure that slavery never extends beyond the South.

4:52When the Republicans won the presidency in 1860, Southern states decided they could no longer remain a part of the Union. They were not going to be a part of a pro-freedom-led government out of Washington, DC, and so they seceded from the Union, and we entered into Civil War. [MUSIC]