Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

This day, July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution.

He said, quote, the Constitution of the United States of America is the source and parent of all other atrocities,

a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

Garrison was of course talking about the institution of slavery here and how the Constitution in his view

supported the institution of slavery he was perhaps the most well-known

anti-slavery crusader of the time and in this quote an act was

voicing something that a lot of abolitionists felt.

For decades some abolitionists had been arguing that the institution of slavery would not

withstand close scrutiny of the founding documents but now Garrison and others had come to believe

the opposite that the Constitution was in fact being used to preserve slavery.

So here to discuss Garrison's activism the way in which the Constitution was and is, I will mention,

contested on the question of slavery and the various abolitionist arguments of the time are, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. So Kelly not to dive right into the

stickiest of questions here but you know we've talked a lot about the sort of spectrum of

abolitionist and anti-slavery arguments being made in this period. But I'm fascinated by this notion of the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, an anti-slavery document, and in particular I think what I tried to get at in the intro, this notion that you know some people had put their

hopes in the idea that the Constitution would bear out an anti-slavery argument but then maybe

starting to change and realize oh no an anti-slavery argument actually needs to confront the Constitution

head on. Yeah, I mean part of the problem is that the Constitution is

ambiguous so it's not clear not not crystal clear anyways, in terms of how it operates among the institution

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