I write this brief note on the evening of US Constitution Day, September 17, 2026, and a few hours after the first airing of my fifth radio hour with Egberto Willies on KPFT Houston and, we hope, soon, other Pacifica and public stations.
The second half of today’s episode, “Who Owns Democracy? Rewriting the Rules of Wealth, Rights, and Working-Class Power,” focused on the Constitution, whether it primarily benefits the rich and powerful, which is generally Egberto’s view (though I don’t want to put words in his mouth!) Or is it, as Frederick Douglass described in in his celebrated July 5, 1852, address to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” His answer: “a glorious liberty document,” which is generally my view.
But before we got there, we spent the first half hour on a challenge that Egberto had posed at the end of last week’s show. I had spent much of last week’s show defending the position that redistributing power is more important than redistributing wealth. Of course, doing one requires doing the other. But, I argued, we spend too much time worrying about how much to tax the wealthy and not enough on how to make them less and us more powerful.
To which Egberto responded, “Wasn’t the income and wealth of the super rich unfairly obtained, and isn’t a large tax penalty on them to take some of it back the right thing to do?”
My position on the question was that trying to impose penalties on people for past actions, which were not clearly criminal but merely took advantage of existing loopholes and opportunities, is a distraction from what we should be doing: revising the the game to make it fairer, getting rid of the loopholes, changing the structure of opportunities, etc.
We went at the issue for the first half hour and discussed, among other things, the alternative merits of blame-fixing—who is good and who is bad—as opposed to problem-solving—what is right and what is wrong?
I leave it to readers and listeners to decide the issue for themselves. (In addition to the video and audio, there is supposed to be a lightly edited transcript of the hour, which makes for much easier and clear reading, somewhere on the site, though I’m not sure where! I promise to get to the bottom of that and make sure the transcript is prominently displayed near each recording. We are committed to producing a clean, more considered copy of each episode.)
From there, as I noted, we turned to the Constitution, which was ratified on September 17, 1787, when the popular referendum of ninth of the thirteen states to vote in favor and created a new federal government of at least those nine. The other four would soon join, as would Vermont, and the states were officially “united.”
Egberto took the position that the Constitution was a deeply flawed document, which compromised with slavery and was a retreat rather than an advance for the cause of freedom. I agreed that in the drafting of the document, the abolitionist delegates had to agree to compromise language with the enslaving delegates in three places in particular:
the representation for the enslaved population at three-fifths its number (the enslavers wanted the enslaved represented in full, the abolitionists not at all);
a 20-year delay before the federal government could abolish the international slave trade (the enslavers didn’t want the government to have the power at all, the abolitionists agreed to a 20-year delay); and
a clause subjecting those “bound to service” to return if captured (the enslavers wanted fugitives treated as criminals, the abolitionists refused).
But, I argued the abolitionists did not give in on the central question: whether slavery—the owning of people—was a legitimate form of property that the new government was duty bound to respect.
On this point, a majority of the delegates to the constitutional convention held firm. They refused to recognize the legitimacy of slave property, agreeing only to allow the people of each state to decide the issue for themselves.
They would not agree, as the enslavers asked them to do, to require states in which slavery had been abolished to treat as a legitimate a property right in persons, if recognized as such by another state.
Thus, the so-called “fugitive slave clause” refused to declare an enslaved person as subject to return, saying only that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State … escaping into another, shall … be discharged from such Service or Labour.”
There is a waffle there, of course. The anti-slavery delegates agreed to read “held to” as “under contract to perform” and applying to indentured servants and others who had agreed to work for a term of one or more years, while the pro-slavery delegates read it to include those they held as chattel slaves, as if they, too, were merely contract labors for life and, also, supposedly, their children!
But this was as far as the majority would go. They refused explicitly to declare the enslaved as subject to return, leaving it a provision open to interpretation; and they refused to declare anyone escaping from their “labor or service” a criminal whom the public authorities in other states were required to extradite—capture and return—as they would any other felon. All they would agree to was that IF “the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due” could find and prove their claim to them, THEN they “shall be delivered up.”
It was not a morally high-minded position. It allowed the enslavers room to maneuver. But it was not what the enslavers wanted, as they proved when they forced through the accurately named Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, which ought to have been called the Capitulation of 1850.
They thought the compromise necessary if the stronger federal government desired by all the delegates was to be created.
The new nation was surrounded by three of the most powerful, belligerent, and expansionist natons in the workd at the time—Great Britain, France, and Spain. Did they sacrifice the freedom of the enslaved on the alter of their own safety?
What they did can be viewed that way. But it can also be viewed as a choice they felt they had to make to protect the still fragile plant of freedom that was only just beginning to sprout.
The “fugitive slave clause” was a compromise. So, too, was the three-fifths provision, which gave the slavery states disproportionate representation in Congress. Something they had insisted on as otherwise vulnerable minority! An advantage, which they lost again as the country added more and more people and free states, which drove the enslavers to repeated war and ultimately secession.
All stories for another time! Here I wish only to note that the case for the anti-slavery Constitution is not something I just made up. On the contrary, it had been made before, by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the entire Republican Party at the time, for reasons that we discuss at length in the episode.
It is often said that the Civil War was not started to end slavery but to save the Union. The truth of the matter, however, is that the Union which the North fought to save was the anti-slavery Union of the anti-slavery Constitution, which they argued was the true union and the only one worth saving!
Egberto and my discussion ranged far and wide from these issues, encompassing the revolutionary war, the modern civil rights or Black freedom struggles, and the run-up to the Civil War. Check it out!