Quotes from Don E. Fehrenbacher

Most striking, however, was the position taken in the 1840s by William Lloyd Garrison and his wing of the abolitionist movement. The Garrisonians had come to agree completely with the southern view of the Constitution as a proslavery document.5°

By the time of the Revolution there was in each colony an accumulated body of slave law that did not so much establish slavery as acknowledge its presence, sanction it, and regulate its conduct.

The framers of the Constitution, dealing with slavery as an incidental but troublesome circumstance, ended by extending it a kind of shamefaced recognition that included a measure of protection, but they contributed little to defining its national status.