The U.S. Constitution: System and Procedure Build Justice

Politicians refer to the Constitution often, usually claiming that it supports whatever viewpoint they have. But what is the Constitution? And equally importantly, what is the Constitution not?

The Constitution is not a set of rules and laws. The Constitution is a set of instructions about how to make rules and laws. For example, the Constitution doesn’t care whether a community makes recreational marijuana legal or not. It doesn’t care whether the speed limit on the roads is 50 MPH or 80 MPH.

But the Constitution cares about how that decision gets made.

For example, the Constitution delegates the power to each state’s legislature to decide whether or not to legalize recreational marijuna. The point is not whether it’s legal or illegal: the point is who makes that decision. It would be a violation of the Constitutional process if the U.S. Congress made that decision.

There are some decisions which should be made by the state legislatures, and other decisions which should be made by the Congress. The important question isn’t which decisions get made, but rather, who should make them.

In the same way, there are some responsibilities to be carried out by the president and his executive branch, and other responsibilities which belong to the Supreme Court and its judicial branch.

In the long run, it doesn’t matter which decision gets made — whether marijuana is legal or not — but it matters who made that decision, and which process was used to make that decision.

The Constitution is a neutral document in this way. The Constitution can be, and should be, used by both sides — the people who are “for” and the people who are “against” any particular idea.

Without a Constitution, and without people acting according to the Constitutional process, chaos results, and after the chaos, some individual or group can seize power, and then the people’s freedom disappears. True freedom and true justice exist only where a neutral procedure is followed.

Because the Constitution is neutral, it is also timeless. Changes in society, technology, culture, or economics don’t affect the Constitution, and the process can apply equally to today or to a hundred years into the future. Constitutional procedures work for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or Hindus. Constitutional processes work for old and young, rich and poor, men and women. They work for any ethnicity, race, or culture.

The ideas in the Constitution last because they are built on human nature. Every human being has certain features in common with every other human being — anywhere, anytime. Concerning the universal principles of human beings, and how they are factored in to the Constitution, Ben Shapiro writes:

The founders constructed the Constitution on the basis of three main realizations about human beings. First, they realized that human beings are imperfect, selfish, driven by self-interest. They will go to war with each other to assure the victory of that self-interest. The founders agreed with the central theory of Thomas Hobbes, that without government, man reverted to constant warfare: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Given that human beings are imperfect, how can they build a peaceful society? How can they live and work together in justice, peace, prosperity, and freedom?

Back in the late 1600s, Thomas Hobbes wrote that only with a powerful absolute government — a dictatorship — could human society function decently. He felt that if people had freedom, they’d use it to attack each other. Today, there are still people like Hobbes: they believe that a powerful government should control the lives of people and make decisions for them.

But the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution didn’t agree with Hobbes. They thought that humans can have both a decent society and freedom at the same time. They got some of those ideas from the books written by John Locke, who lived a few years after Hobbes, but before the foundation of the United States.

Ben Shapiro explains how Locke articulated the idea of “limited government” — the idea that the government’s power shouldn’t be infinite, but rather that by limited the government’s power, the people protect their own freedom:

But they disagreed with Hobbes that the only way to solve this conundrum was a great and powerful ruler. They believed that such rulers were similarly capable of brutality in their own self-interest. They adopted this philosophy from John Locke, who wrote, “The end of government is the good of mankind; and which is best for mankind, that the people should be always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed, when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power, and employ it for the destruction, and not the preservation of the properties of their people?” In other words, if rulers invaded the rights of others, they ought to be curbed.

If the government has more power, then the people have less freedom; if the government has less power, then the people have more freedom.

How, then, can people structure a government to ensure that it doesn’t become too powerful?

The Constitutional system with its separation of powers is designed to make sure that no one part of the government gets too much control. If power divided between the three branches — legislative, judicial, executive — then each branch will have roughly one-third of the power, which is less than half, and therefore can be curbed by the other two branches.

The power is further divided between federal, state, and local governments. When the power is chopped up into small pieces, and different parts of government each have a piece, it prevents any one part of government from having too much power. Freedom is achieved and preserved when the government is relatively weak and limited: a strong and expansive government is the type of government which can take people’s liberties and properties.

Ben Shapiro explains how the Constitution carefully divides and balances power between different parts of the government:

So, how could society survive without an all-powerful ruler checking men? By a series of mutual checks and balances. As James Madison famously stated in Federalist #51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

It might seem odd to say that people want a weak and limited government. Wouldn’t everyone hope for a strong and expansive government? But it’s better to have a strong nation with a weak government than to have a weak nation with a strong government. Either the government will have control, or people will have control. In order to be free, the people must have a limited government. The greatest danger to liberty is the government. This is ironic, because the purpose of the government is to protect the people’s freedom, but it is also true that when people lose their liberty, it’s because the government took it.

The best thing that can happen is gridlock. The word ‘gridlock’ might seem like something undesirable, but when the government is all bogged down in its own procedures, and when the government is doing little or nothing, that is when the people have the most freedom. When there’s a problem in society, or a problem, rather than having the government “do something,” it’s best if the government does nothing, so that the people can figure out how to fix it. The people will do a better job than the government.

The Constitution is filled with various mechanisms designed to slow down the government’s processes, a Ben Shapiro explains:

Checks and balances were designed to prevent government from overreaching its boundaries; only widespread agreement could overrule such checks and balances. The judiciary was therefore designed not to lord over the executive and legislative branches, but to interpret the law “under the Constitution;” it was checked by its requirement of funding from Congress and execution from the executive branch. The legislative branch was designed to pass laws in concurrence with the Constitution; the president was given the power to veto laws. Congress itself was checked by distribution of power between the House, chosen by population, and the Senate, chosen by state. The executive branch was checked by the legislature; the executive couldn’t create laws or self-fund, and the legislature could always impeach an incipient tyrant. The federal government as a whole was checked by state governments, all of which had their own checks and balances.

Although people often speak idealistically about the Constitution, it is, for the most part, not an idealistic document. The preamble, to be sure, does mention some ideals: justice, tranquility, the “blessings of liberty,” etc.

But the majority of the Constitution is a procedural document. Is the mechanics of running a government. The grand ideals are more found in the Declaration of Independence. The two documents complement each other. The Bill of Rights, a third essential document, is a part of the Constitution, an extension of the Constitution. “The structural Constitution,” as Ben Shapiro writes, “is the essence of American government.”

The design principles behind the Constitution factored in two realities: first, that the concrete details of societies change, and second, that human nature never changes. A system of government built on an understanding of human nature is designed to work in different situations. The Constitution applies, like the laws of algebra, in all contexts:

And it has nothing to do with technological progress. It relies on the same vision of human nature held by the founders, and the same vision of human rights: that because you are a human being, you have inviolable rights that cannot be removed from you by majority vote.

One universal aspect of human nature is that people desire freedom. Another aspect of human nature is that, given large amounts of power, people will sometimes take freedom away from others. The Constitution was formulated around these two factors. It is a system designed to maximize liberty and to protect liberty.

The Tax Withholding System: People Pay More Than They Know

Although there were small experiments with income tax in the United States going as far back as the 1860s, it was not until 1913 that the income tax system as it is known today appeared. For the first twenty-five years or so, the income tax rates were low, and in some years, people of the working class did not need to pay any income tax at all.

But three factors caused the government to need more money: first, the massive debt caused by New Deal spending programs; second, future obligations created by entitlement programs; third, the Second World War. Needing more money, the government raised income tax rates significantly.

The new rates were publicized, yet people didn’t understand that, on March 15 of each year, they would be forced to send thousands of dollars to the government. There was a big problem in the making. What would the government do when the majority of its citizens didn’t pay their taxes — or were unable to pay their taxes.

Historian Amity Shlaes recounts the looming problem facing government bureaucrats:

As March 15, 1943 neared, though, it became clear that many citizens still were not filing returns. Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury secretary, confronted colleagues about the nightmarish prospect of mass tax evasion: “Suppose we have to go out and try to arrest five million people?”

Clearly, a new system was needed. It wouldn’t work simply to present each individual America, once a year, with a bill for thousands of dollars.

Enter Ruml, man of ideas. At Macy’s, he had observed that customers didn’t like big bills. They preferred making payments bit by bit, in the installment plan, even if they had to pay for the pleasure with interest. So Ruml devised a plan, which he unfolded to his colleagues at the Federal Reserve and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The government would get business to do its work, collecting taxes for it. Employers would retain a percentage of taxes from workers every week — say, 20 percent — and forward it directly to Washington’s war chest. This would hide the size of the new taxes from the worker. No longer would the worker ever have to look his tax bill square in the eye. Workers need never even see the money they were forgoing. Withholding as we know it today was born.

The new tax system had several advantages. First, the government would get money in a steady stream all year long instead of one big amount once a year. Second, the government could collect interest on some of that money before it was spent. Third, the government could collect excess money from each individual, and then give an annual refund — meaning that the government had gotten an interest-free loan from each citizen. Fourth, the ordinary taxpayer would never really understand how much money the government was taking.

Workers received their pay, but before they got it, the government had already taken a cut. The government could steal their money without the workers feeling the pain. There was also no consent requested from, or given by, the worker. The money simply disappeared into the government.

This was a revolution in politics and economics, both of which depend more on perception than reality, more on psychology than mathematics. Amity Shlaes explains:

This was more than change, it was transformation. Government would put its hand into the taxpayer’s pocket and grab its share of tax — without asking.

The transfer of the concept from a department store to the government made sense: both institutions could make life more palatable for the individual by offering a “pay as you go” program.

The differences, however, were significant: the department store still required a deliberate volitional act of payment from the consumer monthly. The government required neither consent nor willingness, nor even awareness, on the part of the worker.

Ruml hadn’t invented withholding. His genius was to make its introduction palatable by adding a powerful sweetener: the federal government would offer a tax amnesty for the previous year, allowing confused and indebted citizens to start on new footing. It was the most ambitious bait-and-switch plan in America’s history.

The advantage of the withholding tax was that it made the process more comfortable for the taxpayer. But comfort is not freedom. By analogy, one might add sugar to poison to make it easier to consume, but it remains poisonous. The withholding tax was easier to endure, but in the end, the government still confiscated a worker’s money.

Taxpayers were faced with painful choices. In the absence of a withholding plan, some taxpayers took on debt in order to pay the massive annual tax bill. Withholding would avoid this debt. It also helped the war effort, and in 1943, as Amity Shlaes writes, that was loyal thing to do:

Ruml advertised his project as a humane effort to smooth life in the disruption of the war. He noted it was a way to help taxpayers out of the habit of carrying income tax debt, debt that he characterized as “a pernicious fungus permeating the structure of things.” The move was also patriotic.

The mechanism for orchestrating a withholding tax at all would have been technically daunting. To orchestrate it in a short period of time would have been impossible. But something made it possible: the government had already put in place a similar system to collect taxpayer’s money for the Social Security system.

Implementing the withholding program was very possible, even in a short period of time, because of the organizational infrastructure of the Social Security program. The IRS could simply piggyback on Social Security collections.

Ruml had several reasons for wagering that his project would work. One was that Americans, smarting from the Japanese assault, were now willing to sacrifice more than any other point in memory. The second was that the federal government would be able to administer withholding - six successful years of Social Security showed that the government, for the first time ever, was able to handle such a mass program of revenue collection. The third was packaging. He called his program not “collection at the source” or “withholding,” two technical terms for what he was doing. Instead he chose a zippier name: “pay as you go.”

In addition to a more palatable name, the new withholding system had advocates and fans among the economic experts of the day. John Maynard Keynes saw taxes, not only as a method for collecting needed revenue for the government, but as a method for regulating the macroeconomy. Keynes advised that, in some circumstances, governments should collect taxes even if they don’t need the money.

The withholding system allowed the government to easily and quickly change or increase the amount of taxes it was collecting, and so respond in Keynesian fashion to changes in the economic environment.

Ruml’s plan went from paying the government’s bills to managing the entire economy by increasing, suddenly and at will, the amount of money being taken from each worker’s paycheck.

The policy thinkers of the day embraced the Ruml arrangement. This was an era in which John Maynard Keynes dominated the world of economics. The Keynesians placed enormous faith in government. The one thing they liked about the war was that it demonstrated to the world all the miracles that Big Government could work. The Ruml plan would give them the wherewithal to have their projects even, they sensed, after the war ended. Keynesianism also said high taxes were crucial to controlling inflation. The Keynesians saw withholding as the right tool for getting those necessary high taxes.

After a few years, some of the experts began to question the wisdom of the withholding plan. One of them, Milton Friedman, later regretted promoting the withholding program, and contended that it should be dismantled, as Amity Shlaes reports:

Among withholding’s backers was the man who was later to become the world’s leading free-market economist, Milton Friedman. Decades after the war, Friedman called for the abolition of the withholding system. In his memoirs he wrote that “we concentrated single-mindedly on promoting the war effort. We gave next to no consideration to any longer-run consequences. It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom. Yet, that was precisely what I was doing.” With an almost audible sigh, Friedman added: “There is an important lesson here. It is far easier to introduce a government program than to get rid of it.”

Milton Friedman said, in an interview:

I played a significant role, no question about it, in introducing withholding. I think it's a great mistake for peacetime, but in 1941–43, all of us were concentrating on the war. I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now.

One may note the general principle that wartime allows governments to take drastic actions which would not be countenanced in peacetime. People are willing to tolerate decisions made as necessary emergency actions during war. The sad lesson is that, with the advent of peace, the wartime controls often remain in the hands of the government.

Roosevelt’s Manic Start: The Chaos of the New Deal

The election of 1932 was an expression of desperate hope. Poverty and unemployment were at high levels and threatened to go even higher. The campaigns of Hoover and Roosevelt were based more on sentiment than specific policy proposals.

Roosevelt projected hope and optimism. One of the few specific actions he presented to voters was that he would support the repeal of the eighteenth amendment. Procedurally, however, the amendment was repealed by the individual states. Roosevelt’s presidential appeal on the topic was at best symbolic, but also utterly ineffectual and irrelevant.

The Democrats had lost the 1928 presidential election. They thought that one reason for the loss was that their candidate, Al Smith, was a Roman Catholic. So in 1932, they nominated Roosevelt, a Protestant. There was, in fact, some anti-Catholic sentiment in the nation at that time; it is difficult to determine, however, whether that sentiment played a major role in the out come of the 1928 election.

Voter sentiment was against Hoover, rightly or wrongly blaming him for the Great Depression.

In the end, Roosevelt won by a landslide.

The nation was eager to see what Roosevelt would do when he took office. Because the campaign had been vague on details, the public wasn’t sure which actions he would take. He’d promised to take measures dramatically and swiftly, as historian Amity Shlaes writes:

By the time of his inauguration back on March 4, everyone knew that Roosevelt would experiment with the economy. But no one knew to what extent. Now, in his first year in office, Roosevelt was showing them. He would present it all in what came to be known as the Hundred Days, that first frenzied period of legislative activity.

Roosevelt’s actions were quick and significant, but not necessarily consistent or planned. His approach was one of experimentation. He simply wanted to what would work.

Two major obstacles confronted FDR. First, the stakes were high to simply experiment: people’s livelihoods were at risk. Second, so many variables were changed and changing that discerning cause and effect was difficult or impossible.

Several of FDR’s goals were in tension with each other: He hoped to raise prices, to increase income for both companies and workers. Yet an increase in price could lead to weaker demand, reducing sales and subsequently income.

The president and the nation were, however, impatient and not willing to conduct careful analysis. They simply wanted to see action, and they hoped that action would bring improvement, even if the action was random, as Amity Shlaes explains:

The main tasks Roosevelt assigned himself were simple. The first was that there be a broad sweep of activity; Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter.

So it was, then, that measures were taken to reduce agricultural output, even as food shortages shaped the market. No serious thought was given to the decreased income to farmers.

Likewise, the New Deal would inevitably lead to increased taxation and increased national debt, sooner or later, and those phenomena would similarly slow the economy.

The New Deal, which ultimately failed to offer significant help — economic variables hadn’t improved by 1937 — was the result of sentiment rather than analysis: a chaotic flurry of activity.

Turning the Corner: How and When Slavery Began to End in the Americas

Students who know even a small amount about United States History, or American History, are aware that slavery existed. That’s not new knowledge.

What is less well known is that slavery existed in the Americas — North America, Central America, and South America — not for centuries, but for millennia: not for hundreds of years, but for thousands of years. Slavery was ubiquitous in the Americas.

This means that slavery cannot be treated merely as “a tangential part of the country’s history,” in the words of journalist Joe Heim, or as “an unfortunate blemish.” Slavery was an essential and pervasive feature of pre-Columbian cultures.

It is well documented that civilizations like the Inca, the Aztec, and the Maya were based on slavery. It is less well understood that slavery permeated the areas which are now Canada and the United States.

Given that slavery was everywhere established as a foundation of pre-Columbian societies in the Americas, the questions can be posed: How did slavery end? When did anti-slavery and abolitionist sentiments appear in the Americas?

The first permanent and enduring settlement in what would become the original thirteen states of the United States was, of course, Jamestown in Virginia, founded in 1607. Within a few years, the anti-slavery view had become so prevelant that slavery was outlawed in Rhode Island in 1652, creating for the first time in history a defined territory in the Americas in which slavery was illegal.

After hundreds and thousands of years, for the first time ever, there was a place in the Americas in which slavery was now longer perceived by society as the natural default circumstance. The inhumane institution of chattel slavery, kept in place for millennia, finally began to crumble after the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the ensuing settlements in North America.

Although the first radical break with slavery began in the early 1600s, it would last many years until the last traces of it were erased from the hemisphere. The eradication of slavery proceeded in steps. First, the majority of the population in the majority of the United States got rid of slavery. But a few states clung fiercely to slavery: the result was the bloodiest military conflict in U.S. history.

Because of the magnitude of the U.S. Civil War, and the fact that the war was caused largely by slavery, Joe Heim notes that people sometimes think of slavery “primarily as a factor in the Civil War.” But slavery is much more than the major cause of this war.

Slavery is a defining characteristic of pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations in the Americas. It was omnipresent in the Western Hemisphere until settlements of Europeans established themselves on the continents.

Sadly, some of the European were enchanted by the ways of the indigenous Native Americans and adopted the practice of slavery. Ultimately, slavery had to be purged not only out of the indigenous societies, but also out of some of the Anglo-European settlers.

The institution of slavery was so persistent that it took several centuries of European presence to finally eradicate chattel slavery.

African-American Leaders during the Great Depression: The Government Is Incapable, so Citizens Take Action

During the Great Depression, the ingenuity of ordinary citizens was fueled by their challenging circumstances. The overworked phrases of “thinking outside the box” and “necessity being the mother of invention” are correctly applied to this phenomenon.

Given the government's inability to make meaningful inroads against economic hardships — in 1937, things were as bad, or worse, than they were in 1932, despite five years of FDR’s “New Deal” — everyday people had to find ways to survive.

Beyond merely surviving, they found ways to uplift and encourage their communities: ways to develop and strengthen a sense of neighborliness. As examples, historian Amity Shlaes offers two African-American leaders who understood that when the government is unable to help, common citizens could step up and achieve great things:

Even the poorest communities, including the blacks, found their own response to joblessness and hunger. In Washington, Solomon Elder Lightfoot Michaux, a radio preacher, reached millions with his “Happy Am I” aphorisms. Michaux fed the hungry and maintained apartment houses for those evicted. Another figure in the black community to respond was Father Divine on Long Island. He began to expand the Sunday banquets served at his Sayville residence. What stood out about Father Divine’s meals was that they were the opposite of apples on the corner or soup kitchen food. Father Divine’s meals were luxurious. The coffee percolated; the roasts - chickens, ducks - were plentiful; the vegetables were splendid. “We charge nothing,” Father Divine ordained. “Anyone, man, woman, or child, regardless of race, color or creed can come here naked and we will clothe them, hungry and will will feed them.”

After the Great Depression and after WW2, Lightfoot Solomon Michaux went on to host his own television show starting in 1947. (In 1948 the show went from a regional broadcast to a national one.) It is significant that an African-American was hosting a TV program at this early date in the development of regular commercial broadcasting. Elder Michaux was born in Virginia in 1885.

Father Divine is often alleged to be the source of the phrase “you’ve got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” which was later made into a popular song. Father Divine remains a mysterious figure: his exact birth date, birth place, and original legal name remain unclear.

The lesson from Elder Michaux and Father Divine is this: The people can’t wait for the government to fix problems, because it usually doesn’t or can’t. The people can work together, and work around the government, to make life better for their communities.

American Women Advance in the 19th Century: The 1800s as an Era of Growth for Women’s Rights in the United States

During the 1800s, the legal and social status of women in the United States improved significantly. Historians can document this development in a number of specific instances.

Women in the U.S. began voting in 1869. The first state to enact women’s suffrage was Wyoming, quickly followed by other states. By the end of the century, the majority of women in the country had a legislative guarantee for their right to vote.

Likewise, women began serving on juries during the 1800s. They served on an equal basis with men. In this development, too, Wyoming was the first state to promote the practice of having men and women serve equally on juries. After Wyoming began this custom in 1870, several other states followed suit.

By 1864, it was established legal precedent for women to testify in court: a woman’s statement was admitted into evidence on the same basis as a man’s statement. It is difficult to determine exactly when the practice began, but in 1864, Senator James Harlan, a lawyer himself, cited the practice in the Congressional Globe as well-established. (The Globe is the predecessor to the Congressional Record).

Women were elected to public office during the 1800s. Susanna Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas, in 1887. Julia Addington was elected as a county superintendent of schools in Iowa in 1869. Annie White Baxter was elected as a county clerk in Missouri in 1890. In 1896, Martha Hughes Cannon was elected a state senator in Utah.

Many more examples can be named: In 1894, Colorado elected three women to its legislature — Clara Cressingham, Carrie Holly, and Francis Klock.

Lauren Eisenhuth was elected in 1892 to be the state superintendent of public instruction in North Dakota. In 1898, Permeal French was elected to be the superintendent of public instruction in Idaho.

This trend — women becoming empowered in electoral politics and empowered in the legal justice system — began in the western states, perhaps because men and women often worked as a team, creating homesteads out of undeveloped land. This trend also took root where most voters identified with the Republican Party: the Republicans, having succeeded in their primary goal of abolishing slavery, turned to women’s rights as their next major task.

By contrast, the Democratic Party, having lost the U.S. Civil War, still felt the sting of defeat, and was not energized to pursue any major political initiatives.

The list of women elected to public office in the 1800s is much longer than can be presented here.

By 1888, the mayor and all the members of the city council in Oskaloosa, Kansas, were women. In 1887, all the members of the city council in Syracuse, Kansas, were women.

Women made great advances in higher education during the nineteenth century. In 1836, women began studying at Wesleyan College; in 1837 at Oberlin College. In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from medical school at Geneva Medical College in New York, earning her M.D.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler earned her M.D. in Boston in 1864.

In 1858, Sarah Jane Woodson Early became a professor at Wilberforce College.

By 1899, it was common for women to be enrolled at universities and colleges across America.

Armed with professional degrees, women made their way into various careers. In 1869, Arabella Mansfield became the first woman admitted to the bar and granted a law license in the United States. By 1879, women who were lawyers were arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1870, Ada Kepley became the first woman to be a judge in the United States.

By the end of the century, women were regularly graduating from law school and practicing as attorneys across the United States.

The long list of other developments during the 1800s in the United States includes: Women were recognized as having full legal agency to negotiate, conclude, and sign contracts; to own and inherit property; and to keep or invest their earnings.

Although it was not until 1916 that Jeanette Rankin was elected as the first woman to serve in the United States Congress, her election was the result of the advancements made during the preceding century.

The nineteenth amendment, ratified in August 1920, guaranteed women’s right to vote, but it was by that point in time a merely symbolic act. It wasn’t needed because women had already been voting for half a century.

A Painful Struggle: America Works to Defeat Slavery

The development of the United States is one of continuously expanding freedom. From times before the nation’s beginning in 1776, the America made progress along various lines in the direction of increasing liberty.

The gravest and greatest of these steps was, of course, the elimination of slavery. The majority of Americans resisted slavery: the first slaves were imported into Brazil and other South American regions in 1510, but North America was able to hold out against slavery for more than another century.

Prior to the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation, the majority of the residents in the majority of the thirteen colonies opposed slavery. Led by Roger Wiliams, Rhode Island made slavery illegal in 1652. Samuel Sewall published abolitionist writings in Massachusetts as early as 1700.

In all thirteen colonies, energetic abolitionist movements were at work prior to 1776.

Once the nation was established as independent from Britain, is was clear that the “Founders wanted to abolish slavery,” as Ben Shapiro writes:

From its founding, the United States attempted to come to grips with slavery and phase it out. The state of Vermont was the first sovereign state to abolish slavery, in 1777.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that King George III “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” Rebellion against England’s king was a step toward ending slavery.

Although slavery vanished from most of the original thirteen states, and from those later added to the union, it stubbornly resisted American efforts to eradicate it from some of the states, particularly those which had integrated it into agricultural economies of tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane.

Continuing the struggle against slavery, the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, including the famous and controversial “three-fifths clause.” This phrase was introduced as an anti-slavery tactic: It both created a congnitive dissonance by its disconcerting logic, and denied power to a bloc of pro-slavery states. Ben Shapiro explains:

The Constitution of the United States is frequently seen as enshrining slavery, but the so-called three-fifths clause was an attempt to do the opposite. The whole question of popular apportionment rested on whether to count slaves as full people for purposes of representation. To do so would have put the slaveholding south at a significant advantage: they would have counted slaves in their population, not allowed them to vote, then used their increased representation in order to re-enshrine slavery. As James Madison noted, the delegates from South Carolina fought for blacks to be counted as whole people so as to include them “in the rule of representation, equally with the Whites.” The three-fifths compromise was designed to curb the South’s expansionist tendencies with regard to slavery by preventing them from stacking the electoral deck. The Constitution also allowed slave importation to continue until 1808 — but Congress moved in 1807 to end it there.

By 1807, then, the U.S. was ahead of schedule in its efforts to end slavery. A small but entrenched group of leaders continued to support slavery.

The final end of slavery was possible because the nation’s economy was based, not on slavery, but on free enterprise. Not only was the industrial part of the country not dependent on slavery, but rather it actively opposed slavery.

Yet abolitionism was not confined to any one part of the United States. Before and during the war, significant abolitionist movements existed in all states. The South was not a united monolithic pro-slavery bloc.

For at least these two reasons, then, a massive amount of energy was poured into the war to end slavery: because the larger part of the economy did not rely on slavery, and because the larger part of society was opposed to slavery:

The United States fought a great and massive Civil War to free the slaves, in which over 620,000 Americans died, nearly half the total number of Americans to die in all wars combined. The economy of the United States was not built on slavery — in fact, the South’s economic power was dismal compared to that of the north, which is why the north was able to overcome the south during the Civil War.

Between 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and 1865, when the Civil War ended, America achieved its goal of ending slavery.

In South America, Brazil kept slavery long after the United States had ended it. Slavery was not abolished Brazil until 1888. Likewise, Cuba maintained slavery until 1886.

The movement to abolish slavery in the United States was part of a larger trend to expand freedom for all people. As soon as the Civil War was over, and slavery was gone, this movement went on to obtain another great goal. The abolitionist movement gave birth to the suffrage movement, with the goal of women voting. The same political party, the part of Lincoln, energized both movements. By 1869 — not 1920 as sometimes reported — women in the United States began voting regularly.

Throughout American history, the nation has worked to increase liberty, expanding suffrage to larger and larger segments of society, creating more economic opportunities, and allowing more and varied forms of expression.

The common thread which connects the points of U.S. history from the 1600s to the present is the persistent drive to expand freedom.