Eighty-nine years after the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed all men to be free and equal, race-based chattel slavery would be no more in the United States. ... Race and the Constitution.

Elizabeth Wydra is president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. Since its ratification 150 years ago, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has guaranteed that “all persons born or ...

Abraham Lincoln understood the “liberty” promised by the Constitution to require economic independence and to be inconsistent with chattel slavery and a narrow concentration of capital.

By the late 1850s—thanks largely to the provision in this same supposedly antislavery Constitution that granted slaveowners extra power on the basis of their human chattel—support for slavery ...

That language in more than a dozen state constitutions is one of the lasting legacies of chattel slavery in the U.S., and the loophole gave way to other racist measures post-Civil War.

The argument that the Constitution is racist suffers from one fatal flaw: the concept of race does not exist in the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution—or in the Declaration of ...

Douglass was referring to the rights enshrined in three constitutional amendments ratified between 1865 and 1870. ... Did the 13th prohibit only chattel bondage or extend to other elements of ...

In an attempt to keep the peace and prevent further secession, Congress proposed a constitutional amendment on March 2, 1861, stating that the Constitution should never be amended to give Congress ...

Justice Samuel Alito’s claim, that there is no enumeration and original meaning in the Constitution related to involuntary sexual subordination and reproduction, misreads and misunderstands ...

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. By Eric Foner. W.W. Norton; 256 pages; $26.95 and £18.99. RECONSTRUCTION, AMERICA’S reckoning with how to ...

The question of whether the institution of chattel slavery is inherent in the Constitution is being debated in the popular press. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Sean Wilentz argues that "the ...