Exploring Evolution of the Battle for Equality

The Framers of the Constitution struggled with the concept of human equality. The Constitution may have begun with the statement “We the People,” but it failed to define who those people might be. Under the three-fifths clause, the law accepted less-than-human people, a minimization of personhood that could easily be extended to other groups, including, of course, women. Further problems arose as a consequence of the passive voice used in the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. “No person held to service or labour” in one state could avoid that labor by escaping into another state. Not only did the Constitution thus avoid the word “slave,” it also held that such a runaway worker would be “delivered up” to the person to whom the labor was due. But delivered by whom? There was the rub, and most northern states eventually determined that every runaway slave posed a moral rebuke to the Constitution and the country, and that capturing and returning these fugitives was not their job.