Independence Hall and the Unfinished Sentence

In the summer of seventeen eighty-seven, fifty-five men gathered in this building to draft a constitution for a country that had declared, eleven years earlier, that all men are created equal.

Thirty-nine of them signed the finished document in September. Among the signers was George Washington, who enslaved more than three hundred people at Mount Vernon. Among the signers was James Madison, who enslaved more than a hundred people in Virginia and never freed any of them. Among the non-signers who helped shape the document was Thomas Jefferson, drafting the Notes on the State of Virginia in Paris that same summer, a man who enslaved more than six hundred people over the course of his life and freed five of them in his will.

The building they worked in was the Pennsylvania State House, which we now call Independence Hall. It had already witnessed the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July of seventeen seventy-six. Both acts happened here, in the same rooms, a decade apart.

The Constitution those men produced counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional apportionment. This gave slaveholding states more political power in proportion to their enslaved population, without granting enslaved people any rights at all. The phrase We the People was understood by its authors to mean free, property-owning men.

Walk two blocks east from this building and you reach the Liberty Bell. It was cast in seventeen fifty-two and cracked before it was ever officially hung. Its original name was the State House Bell. The name Liberty Bell was given to it not by the founders but by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, which put the bell's image on the cover of their publication in eighteen thirty-seven, noting the inscription from Leviticus: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. The abolitionists saw the crack as historical, not accidental.

Eighty-one years after the Constitution was signed in this building, the Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to formerly enslaved people. Fifty-two years after that, the Nineteenth Amendment extended voting rights to women. The sentence that begins We the People is still being finished. The building where it started is intact.