Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Transcript:
When Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris of 1783 on January 14th, 1784, it did more than secure peace with England. It affirmed fundamental legal rights, due process, liberty, and justice for all who called this land home. Among those entitled to these guarantees were 500,000 Black Englishmen, nearly 25% of the U.S. population at the time. By U.S. law, these people of British ethnicity were to be set at liberty and were entitled to due process and U.S. citizenship. Yet, in an act of profound injustice, they were systematically denied a voice in shaping the Constitution that would govern their lives. This exclusion was not an oversight but a willful act of hypocrisy and betrayal.
The founding generation knew that under English law, their white citizens had no enforceable property rights over Black Englishmen. They knew that colonial slave codes and Negro laws had been abolished by Parliament’s American Colonies Act of 1766, also known as the Declaratory Act. They knew England’s highest court, in the Somerset decision of 1772, had affirmed Parliament’s supreme legislative power over colonial legislatures. And yet, they conspired to deprive Black Englishmen of their due process and liberty. Their hypocrisy is laid bare in the Declaration of Independence, where they condemned King George III for “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.” Let us be clear. The most valuable laws they lamented losing were, without question, the colonial slave laws that entrenched their power and wealth.
The deliberate exclusion of Black colonials from the constitutional process after the Treaty of Paris ratification was not merely an oversight. It was a calculated decision that undermined the very foundations of American liberty and justice. This betrayal lives on in the very structure of our government. The Electoral College remains the last vestige of the deeply immoral bargain enshrined in the Constitution of 1787. It was a provision born of political compromise designed to appease influential slaveholding Americans who feared three things: that a strong president might wield executive power to emancipate the 500,000 Black Englishmen, that the financial exploitation of these individuals could be threatened, and that their influence in government would be diminished without the three-fifths compromise.
By counting three-fifths of their enslaved population for congressional representation, Southern states gained disproportionate power in the Electoral College, far beyond what their free population warranted. Even with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, this relic of oppression persists, a disheartening reminder of the nation’s compromise with slavery.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause, is unequivocal: “All treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land.” By this clause, Congress affirmed the primacy of treaties. The Treaty of Paris of 1783, ratified and binding, is the supreme law. Yet the political question doctrine has long shielded federal courts from adjudicating matters deemed too politically charged, leaving this question unresolved. But let us not mistake inaction for impotence.
It is the constitutional duty of the President to faithfully enforce U.S. laws, to honor our treaties, and to rectify the injustices of the past. It is a duty that cannot be neglected, a moral imperative that must not be ignored. Together, let us honor the treaty, redeem our Constitution, and ensure that liberty and justice are not mere words, but a living reality for all who call this land home.
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