AMERICA 250

Contradictions.

The history of the United States of America is chock full of them. Let’s look at two dates. The first is December 15, 1791.

That was the date the Virginia legislature ratified the Bill of Rights. That made the Commonwealth the eleventh state to okay that first package of Amendments to the US Constitution. It takes three fourths of the states to ratify an Amendment before it becomes part of the Constitution. As far as I can recall from my elementary school arithmetic lessons, Virginia’s eleventh vote put the Bill over the top in the then-13 state union. And, BTW, that little bit of figuring foreshadows a future lowlight, in 1982.

We like to believe that we’re the world’s beacon of freedom. The Bill of Rights is the reason why. Those first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, guarantee and/or codify, mainly, the following:

• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of the press
• Freedom of religion
• Freedom of assembly
• The right to possess firearms
• Protections againts unreasonable serach, arrest, and seizure
• The establishment of the Grand Jury system
• Protections against double jeopardy
• Due process
• Fair compensation for Eminent Domain seizure
• No self-incrimination
• The right to a speedy, public trial by an impartial jury
• The right to confront witnesses
• The right to legal counsel
• Explicit distinctions between the roles of judge and jury
• No excessive bail or fines
• No cruel and unusual punishment
• One person’s rights do not trump another person’s
• and finally, the tasks and duties of the Congress include declaring war, collecting federal taxes, regulating interstate commerce, and other such stuff.

That, Pencillistas, is a highlight. Remember, though, that the Founders were really good at making promises; they and too many of their successors were not so hot at keeping them.

Still, the Bill of Rights is something to brag about.

Not so, the legislation passed on the second date, February 12, 1793. Considering the fact that news traveled slowly in the waning years of the 18th century, there may well have been scads of Americans who hadn’t even heard about the Bill of Rights ratification by then. On a date that, ironically, would eventually be proclaimed a national holiday, President George Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

For all our efforts to relegate responsibility for slavery solely to those misguided, erring souls of the South, the federal government and way, way, way too many people of the North really were complicit in that crime against humanity. The first Fugitive Slave Act (another would be enacted in 1850) meant the entire new nation was guilty for it.

A little background: A couple of years earlier, a Black man named John Davis, who’d been held as a slave in Virginia, had escaped to Pennsylvania. Soon three men from Virginia tracked him down and forced him back into servitude. The Pennsylvania governor hollered that the three Virginia men were criminals — kidnappers, really — and demanded their extradition. The governor of Virginia told him, in so many words, to go to hell. Their conflict eventually reached the halls of Congress and the president’s desk.

More irony. The Pennsylvania governor, Thomas Mifflin, had turned to the feds in hopes his argument would spur legislation to protect the residents of his state, even if they were escaped slaves, from kidnapping by out-of-state miscreants. Instead, Congress passed and Washington signed a new federal law allowing “fugitive” trackers to cross state lines and chase down escaped slaves.

The “property” rights of slaveholders, America now held, trumped the human rights of John Davis and any other slave who might dare flee to the North to escape bondage.

The slave state/free state argument would takes countless twists and turns over the next nearly 70 years, culminating in the Civil War.

Which, as Heather Cox Richardson has written, the South eventually won.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.