Week Five: The Constitution and Slavery — Part One
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Just as it had at the time independence was declared, differences over slavery again threatened to upend the American experiment. In week five, Isaacson and Ellis explain how slavery – which even the slave-owning delegates agreed was incompatible with the values for which our Revolution was fought – was nonetheless dynamite that threatened to blow up the Constitutional Convention.