Messer-Kruse applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution at the LSU Press website....several states, pointing to the British “carrying away” of people they had agreed to surrender, flouted their disregard of the treaty that held the peace by seizing loyalists’ properties and passing laws shielding their citizens from English debt collection…these problems plagued the “Critical Period” leading to the nation’s constitutional reorganization.For more than a century historians have offered competing explanations for why the young American republic radically reordered its federal government. Many have attributed this extraordinary change to financial concerns: the federal government’s lack of an independent taxing authority or the state’s increasing bickering over tolls, tariffs, and international trade. Some have found novel causes. Charles Beard pointed out that many of the key delegates to the drafting convention were speculators in western lands that stood to be better protected under a stronger central government.
Many scholars have attempted to link the Constitution to a project of protecting slavery. Staughton Lynd in the 1960s pointed out the many disguised ways that the Constitution defended slavery and more recently Nicole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times’ 1619 Project implied the Constitution was written just for this purpose. However, while successfully showing that in the end the Constitution advanced the interests of enslavers, these accounts did not provide a compelling account of how slavery played a role in the movement to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and construct a new model of government in the first place.
Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution uncovers the missing link in the historical chain of events that connects slave interests to the Constitutional Convention. The road to Philadelphia begins with the mass escape of enslaved people during the revolutionary war and the British decision (similar to Lincoln’s) to provide sanctuary to them so as to recruit African American soldiers into their army and deny the patriots the enslaved labor their war effort depended on.
After the war, the Americans insisted that the British return these thousands of fugitives, most of whom had been evacuated to Nova Scotia or the Caribbean, in the treaty that recognized American independence. However, this agreement broke down as the English dragged their feet and American states responded by seizing Loyalist property and canceling debts owed to British merchants. Page 99 reprises the importance of this stand-off in a chapter that goes on to note that the failure of the states to uphold a treaty negotiated by the central government was one of the few issues that could not be compromised within the terms of the original confederation. Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution goes on to trace the direct connections between several of the key organizers of the Constitutional Convention and the controversy over the people the patriots’ euphemistically referred to as the “carried off.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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