The founding charter of the United States government, drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 and the oldest written national constitution still in force. It separates power between the states and a national government split into three mutually checking branches, and stands as the nation’s highest law. To hold the slave states in the union it also wrote protections for slavery into its structure — the three-fifths count, the slave-trade clause, the fugitive-slave mandate — without ever naming it, a bargain undone only by civil war and the Reconstruction amendments.
In one hot Philadelphia summer in 1787, a few dozen men met to repair a broken union and instead invented a new kind of government. They wrote a short document that split power between the nation and the states, divided the national government into three branches set to check one another, and declared itself the supreme law of the land. It is the oldest written national constitution still in force, and it is the machine the whole American government still runs on. It was also a bargain with slavery. To win the Southern states, the framers wrote protections for human bondage into the structure without ever using the word, counting three-fifths of the enslaved population for representation and direct taxation, swelling their masters' power. The same document that built a durable, limited, amendable republic also locked that injustice into its foundations. It took a civil war to begin prying it loose.