The Constitution embedded slavery protections without ever naming slavery

Evidence

Even so, the founders were deeply conflicted over slavery. So when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the key texts for framing our republic, the founders did not want to explicitly acknowledge their hypocrisy. They sought instead to shroud it. The Constitution contains eighty-four clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher demonstrates, and five more hold implications for slavery. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 114

Categorization

• XREF: The wordless-but-pervasive constitutional protection of slavery is a concrete, checkable factual anchor for the debate about whether 1619 or 1776 is the true origin.