How the nation's Founders wrote the Constitution to put the US on a path to end slavery

When critics attack the nation’s founders as irredeemably racist, they ignore the Constitution’s anti-slavery time bomb. 

While disparaging that document’s accommodations to slavery, detractors also forget the hammer-blow against the evil institution delivered just weeks before the fateful gathering in Philadelphia to establish a new government.

Rather than treating slavery as an essential, enduring element of the Republic they designed, the leaders of the founding generation shared Lincoln’s hope, expressed 71 years later, that “the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.”