The Founding preserved slavery legally, embedding it in its founding documents

Evidence

None of this changed with the founding of the nation, whose framers preserved the slavery regime in the new Constitution and state laws. Sally Hemings, born in 1773, was the daughter of her mother’s enslaver—John Wayles, the father of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha. Jefferson acquired Hemings when she was a child as part of his inheritance from Wayles. While Hemings and Jefferson were living in Paris, where Jefferson was serving as the foreign minister to France and Hemings as a lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters, Jefferson made Hemings his concubine. According to historian Annette Gordon-Reed, it is likely that by the time Hemings was sixteen, she was either pregnant or about to become pregnant with Jefferson’s child. Hemings lived with Jefferson at Monticello for more than thirty years, giving birth to seven children. Because Hemings was enslaved, her children were deemed Jefferson’s property. Four of Hemings’s children lived to be adults, and Jefferson then arranged to free them. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s central case study: the Constitution as origin story preserving rather than ending slavery — ties to the Wilentz letter dispute over how to date American slavery. — connects to: New York honored slave-state property rights even after abolishing slavery in 1827 — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 39