{"id":1524,"date":"2009-12-16T21:25:32","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T02:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/?p=1524"},"modified":"2010-12-16T21:41:47","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T02:41:47","slug":"1787-liberty-justice-and-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/2009\/12\/16\/1787-liberty-justice-and-union\/","title":{"rendered":"1787 &#8211;Liberty, Justice, and Union"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1530\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><strong><em><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/files\/2010\/12\/obama.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1530\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1530\" title=\"obama\" src=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/files\/2010\/12\/obama-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/files\/2010\/12\/obama-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/files\/2010\/12\/obama.jpg 490w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><p id=\"caption-attachment-1530\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">National Constitution Center, March 18, 2008<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong><em> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation\u2019s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.\u00a0 Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution \u2013 a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18, 2008<\/p>\n<p>The opening of this Civil War anniversary exhibition challenges visitors  by drawing their attention to Barack Obama\u2019s 2008 race speech which was  a pivotal event in the election of the nation\u2019s first black president  but not, at least on the surface, a conventional window on the 1860s.\u00a0  Yet Obama\u2019s political struggles and his thoughtful words set the stage  for an important insight to be gained from this exhibition, one first  enunciated by James Madison in 1792, when he acknowledged that \u201cevery  word\u201d in the Constitution \u201cdecides a question between power &amp;  liberty.\u201d\u00a0 In Obama\u2019s phrasing, power trumped liberty on the question of  \u201cthis nation\u2019s original sin of slavery\u201d and then left the promise of  equality \u201cunfinished.\u201d The brief opening will highlight how several of  these compromises occurred in the early Republic, using graphic  resources and hands-on activities to demonstrate what the nation\u2019s  Founders achieved \u00a0\u2013but more importantly, what they omitted from their  version of the American experiment in self-government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation\u2019s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8417],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beginnings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1533,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/1533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}