Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about all the things that make America the country we know and love.

The place of slavery in the American

history is one of the great and enduring questions of American history.

My old friend Thomas West, professor of politics at Hillsdale College,

has a chapter on the theme in his excellent book, vindicating the founders.

It is the best brief reflection I know of on the subject and well worth reading.

This is one of three stories that is greatly indebted to it.

Any errors that slip in are of course exclusively my own.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one anti-slavery constitution.

August 21st was a rough day at the Constitutional Convention,

meeting an Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

Official deliberations had begun on May 25th, but only now three months later were the framers officially taking up a provision that had made

its way into their draft constitution which came to be called the non-importation

clause. It would forbid the Congress they were designing to tax or prohibit the importation of slaves

anywhere in the United States forever.

Among the many challenges to the statesmanship of these framers of the Constitution,

none was more fundamental or intractable than the problem of slavery.

The Confederation that had just achieved its independence was, as Abraham Lincoln would later say,

dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

But it had no authority to interfere with slavery in any state where it existed.

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