There are 56 men generally considered to be the framers of the United States Constitution. 37 seven of those men were lawyers and 10 were merchants. One of them, if you can believe it was a minister/lawyer. He is in category all his own (talk about serving 2 masters.) The remaining men were mostly politicians (go figure) with a few soldiers and a teacher. This is what they wrote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These are romantic sentiments. As a country, we believe these are the words that give us a freedom so chaste, so perfect that the rest of the world, “…hate(s) us for our freedom.” Like many things, if we examine the actual language of this statement the occupations of the framers could have been predicted. They are the men who try to sell us things, whether we need them or not, and the men that protect them from us when we don’t. Nothing sells like romance. Still, they were hedging their bets even in the preamble. “A more perfect Union…,” tells us that they aren’t really aiming for the top, just better. We all know that when you aim low, you achieve it.

As children we believe that the “We” means everyone here in the country. As adults we know that “We” was, in fact, a very limited group. Given the exclusivity of “We,” it is then astonishing that only the “common” defense and the “general” welfare are addressed. This suggests that even as small as the cliché was, they still didn’t trust everybody in it and needed some wiggle room as far as insuring the domestic tranquility goes. Then, they seal it with a kiss for their descendants and nobody else. Now strictly speaking, their descendants include a whole bunch of people that they didn’t mean to include but that’s another story. Or is it?

Only white land holding men are protected by this document. They envisioned a society where they and people like them were in charge of and benefiting from the country. What did they imagine happened to their children? As they slipped off toward the slave quarters it was easy to lie about their whereabouts. They did it to spare the feelings and the naivete of their virginal brides. That made lying acceptable. As they lay with their concubine it was easy to enjoy the pleasure. It was pleasurable for them, so it couldn’t be rape because they were decent men. A decent man would not take pleasure from rape and since there was pleasure, there was, therefore, no rape.

Pleasure is always easy to justify and when all else fails, there is always good old fashioned denial. Denial is really the only way that I can imagine that these men were able to live with themselves knowing how they brutalized their own children. It is said that a man without a son is a man without a future. (I admit I heard that on HBO’s Rome) So, how does a man live knowing that his son, his future, lives on a subsistence diet and is subjugated by the whim of so many?

We can assume that it was quite a dog fight to get African Americans considered a whole 3/5 of a person. There is no doubt that a substantial contingent wanted to exclude them as people altogether. Struggle and compromise brought them from no humanity to some humanity. There are those that would argue that the glass is half full and that is something to be lauded. That is a conclusion easily reached but it is not the right one. The mention of that percentage of humanity in the Constitution was the foundation of denial of equity for the next 200 years. It was, in fact, worse than if they hadn’t been mentioned at all. Those men who were thoughtful enough to consider the under class, those men who stood up to be counted on the issue, when the going got really tough, when their feet were to the fire, compromised.

There is no question that if the forefathers had pushed further on this issue, things would have become very messy indeed. Perhaps, if the issue had been dealt with to its logical conclusion at that time instead of being truncated by compromise, we could have avoided the travesties created by slavery, jim crow, and segregation. I suggest that sometimes you have to duke it out. You might get bloodied and it will definitely hurt but what is easy today may hurt a lot more for a lot longer tomorrow. Call me romantic, there is something so beautiful about being on the right side of the argument even when it is not the more traveled road.

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