Slavery and the United States Constitution

According to H. W. Brands, because of the declining productivity of crops like tobacco due to soil exhaustion, many of the drafters of the Constitution assumed that slavery would die out naturally in the South as it had done in industrialized North.

This changed with the invention of the modern cotton gin in 1793, which provided a more sustainable and economically viable crop for Southern plantations.

[6] "But", Oakes adds, "there was also an antislavery Constitution.... Congress was granted the power to make 'all needful rules and regulations' for the territories, and for decades after ratification hardly anyone doubted that this authorized the federal government to ban slavery from the territories....[7] Then there was the familiar assertion that the principle of fundamental human equality was embodied in the Constitution....

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution".

", Frederick Douglass cites the Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 left behind by James Madison in order to describe four provisions of the Constitution that are said to be pro-slavery.