The Constitutional Convention - The Fugitive Slave Act

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What ultimately emerges is a minority of already powerful people with tremendous veto power over the whole process. And it's everybody has to compromise with slaveholders, race, the slaveholding states. The fugitive slave act was a pure power move on the part of southern slaveholders who they are a small minority of the overall population of the country. But they used their leverage to say, you're going to give us stuff like this, or we're just going to walk and you're not going to have a country.

In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men got together in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the United States, replacing the new nation’s original blueprint, the Articles of Confederation. But why, exactly? What problems were the framers trying to solve? Was the Constitution designed to advance democracy, or to rein it in? And how can the answers to those questions inform our crises of democracy today?

By producer/host John Biewen with series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Woody Holton, Dan Bullen, and Price Thomas. The series editor is Loretta Williams.