DeSantis Wrote Book Excusing Slavery, Complaining About Women’s Rights

If you were wondering how awful Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is, this story from 2018 gives us a hint. The story tells us, “Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’ 2011 tome, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, is terrible. It’s a book-long screed from the then-Tea Party candidate, in which DeSantis screams at President Barack Obama for 286 pages, implies he is a closet Marxist, and at one point writes that Obama has ‘Muslim roots.’ The book sucks because it is an absolute slog. New Times combed through huge portions of DeSantis’ repetitive, banal, witless, and crushingly pedestrian prose, and the project reads like a book report from a dying Confederate soldier trying to get a community college poli-sci degree. But, more important, the book sucks because parts of it are pretty offensive to black people, Muslims, and women. DeSantis’ book includes justifications excusing the legalization of slavery in the U.S. Constitution, as well as repeated complaints about policies designed to protect women from rape and domestic violence. As the political-opposition research group American Bridge discovered yesterday, portions of the book rationalize the fact that the U.S. Constitution allowed slavery. DeSantis rails against former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who once said the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for creating a so-called free state that allowed slavery. DeSantis also incorrectly claims in the book that the Three-Fifths Compromise — the heinous law that counted black people as three-fifths of a human for purposes of representation in Congress — ‘benefited anti-slavery states.’ This is simply inaccurate: Blacks at the time could not vote, but the provision gave slave-holding states extra representatives in Congress.”

The article continues, “DeSantis castigates Marshall for stating the Constitution was ‘defective from the start’ for allowing slavery. DeSantis says Marshall’s opinions ‘miss the mark’ and that it’s somehow unfair to the Founding Fathers to call them out for keeping slavery legal when the Constitution was written in 1787. In fact, DeSantis dubiously argues, the Constitution was actually good because it set up a system in which slavery was eventually ‘designed to fail.’ Frighteningly, DeSantis argues it was OK for slavery to remain legal in the 1780s because the U.S. Constitution was allegedly so smart and revolutionary that its positive provisions outweighed the part where it legalized enslavement, mass torture, and killing of kidnapped Africans. In short, DeSantis believes approving one of the greatest atrocities in human history was fine because the rest of the Constitution was so good:”

It quotes DeSantis as writing, “This is why there was no real chance that the Convention would abolish the peculiar institution of slavery. Some of the notorious compromises that demonstrated a toleration of slavery, such as the ‘federal ratio,’ which allowed the slave-holding states to count 5 slaves as the equivalent of 3 free citizens (the free states did not want slaves counted at all because they did not want the political power of slave states to be enhanced), were even thought to be necessary to ensure ratification. Hamilton, a counselor to the New York Manumission Society, later lamented that without such a compromise ‘no union could possibly have been formed.’ Similarly, Benjamin Franklin, who served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, declined to read a letter to the Convention delegates from the Society that denounced slavery on religious and republican grounds. Franklin did not want to derail the Convention by further inflaming the delegates over the issue of slavery, and believed that the United States could not last without a new federal government, for, as he wrote in his final Convention speech, ‘our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.’ For anti-slavery delegates like Hamilton and Franklin, abolition of slavery would be a moot point if a failure to erect a functioning government snuffed out the ideals of the American Revolution in their infancy; then, the future of all Americans, the free as well as the slave, would eventually be as serfs to a despotic government.”

The article then tells us, “DeSantis’ false claim that the Three-Fifths Compromise helped anti-slavery states is also a common trope among far-right nut jobs. Convicted campaign-finance violator Dinesh D’Souza tried to make the same claim on TV just this week, when he said the slave-holding states actually wanted slaves to count as ‘full people’ because slaveholders believed slaves were humans. In reality, plantation owners simply wanted more votes in Congress, and even with the Three-Fifths Compromise in place, anti-slaveholding states got nothing out of the deal.”

While the slaveholders did want enslaved people to count as a full person for the purpose of representation, they also wanted to count them as zero persons for the purpose of taxation. In other words, zero if the enslaver had to pay a tax, a full person to give enslaving states more representation in Congress and thus more votes which the enslavers would control. That’s something DeSantis and D’Souza won’t tell you.