"The Compromising Expedient": Justifying a Proslavery Constitution

Why was the Constitution so proslavery? The answer cannot be that proslavery ideologues dominated the process by which the Constitution was drafted and ratified. A historian could count on the fingers of two hands all of the zealous partisans of slavery (and of abolition) who were known in the late 1780s. They occupied the extremes of a debate over a Constitution that in the end neither extreme produced.

The men responsible were the men in the middle-those who considered themselves progressives but who compromised with proslavery extremists for the sake of ratification, and thereby secured a Constitution that resisted much of the Revolution's antislavery impulse.