Akhil Amar Rebukes Founders in Signers' Hall

I started reading Akhil Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography in preparation for my weekend in Philadelphia for the 2010 Peter Jennings Project fellowship conference, Feb. 26 - 28. It was an obvious choice: a comprehensive, even-handed take on America's founding document written by one of the PJP faculty members.

Amar's book is subtle and gently profound, a welcome approach in this age of the pop-culture academic. He evokes far more "ah"s than "ah-hah"s, for instance, when, in his explication of the Second Amendment, he draws a comparison between militias and juries, both groups providing a check against government while still operating within a governmental system.

"Twelve private citizens who simply got together on their own to announce the guilt of a fellow citizen would not be a lawful jury, but a lynch mob. Similarly, self-selected clusters of private citizens who choose to own guns today are not a well-regulated militia of the people; they are gun clubs."

Amar's most impassioned moments come when he censures the Founding Fathers for not only acquiescing to the "Slavocrats," but stacking the deck in their favor.

"Article 1 treated slavery as preferred property [by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for apportionment's sake]. Animal chattel didn't count, land didn't count, buildings didn't count, jewels didn't count, securities didn't count, specie didn't count--only slave property would count."

This system "skewed apportionment and spawned perverse incentives," Amar writes. "Southern governments would be rewarded for promoting slaveholding vis-a-vis other forms of property acquisition. The extreme vice of such a system snaps into focus when we notice that in 1787 no slave state counted as preferred property for state apportionment."

Amar consistently denounces the Founders for their pro-slavery concessions throughout his book, as much from patriotic disappointment, I sensed at a certain point, as from moral indignation. It as though he is mourning the shameful -- and shamefaced -- slavery language that so irrevocably blighted the American Constitution.

I got to meet Amar in Philadelphia and share a meal with him on the second of floor of the National Constitution Center's atrium, which has an unobstructed view straight down the mall of Independence Hall. In Signers' Hall earlier in the evening, I asked him whether Jefferson and Madison deserved a break for not freeing their slaves before they died as George Washington famously did (on his deathbed). I had read in Garry Wills' brilliant Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence that Virginia law at the time prohibited masters from freeing their slaves without making sure they could fend for themselves. This was to guard against callous masters kicking old, unproductive slaves off the plantation the second they became unprofitable rather than paying to feed, clothe and shelter them.

Surrounded by life-size bronze statues of 42 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Amar recoiled. "I have two words for you," he said. "George. Washington. He did it, and they could have, too."

I'll admit I was at a loss. He seemed almost angry at my naiveté. But I recovered, and thinking back now I'm glad I provoked him. I'll have the memory forever: one of the nation's leading constitutional minds, surrounded by the Founders cast in bronze, condemning them for their moral cowardice in the face of the Slavocracy.

At the beginning of a weekend that might have strayed into naked nationalism (it never did), it put everything into perspective.