Compromise allows people who disagree to continue to disagree but jointly arrive at a course of action. In this way things get done.

The American Constitution was born out of compromise. As such, it contained several flaws. The concept that all men were born with certain inalienable rights was proclaimed in the declaration of independence but when the constitution was written slavery was allowed and only white males were given the right to vote. Women, Blacks and Indians were not given the right to vote. In many states only white males who owned property had the right to vote.

The problem with a compromise form of government is that while good for legislating laws dealing with commerce, crime, money and so forth, it is not good for deciding moral questions. Answers to moral questions demand an absolute answer. This is why so many wars have been fought over religion. Slavery is a moral issue. It took a bloody civil war to settle this issue in the United States.

To be sure slavery had great commercial implications, but its existence is a moral issue. In 1865, when the civil war ended 4 million slaves were freed and the loss in capital, by the slave owners, was 2 billion dollars. To put it in prospective, slavery was the single biggest capital investment in the US. The second biggest was the railroads at just under one billion dollars. The budget of the US government in 1860, just before the civil war, was 60 million dollars.

It was not until 1920 that women were given the right to vote and the 1970’s when impediments to voting such as poll taxes were eliminated. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery in the United States could have included voting rights to all but it was a compromise. It was not issued as a moral declaration but to provide a reason to continue the civil war. It changed the civil war from a war to end secession to a total war of out and out victory.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln hoped that the South would change it’s mind and rejoin the Union. When he realized that they were not going to give up until defeated he changed it into a war over slavery. To be sure, slavery was an issue before the Civil War but ending slavery was not the main reasons for starting it. The war was started to preserve the Union.

The genius of the American constitution is that it functions by compromise. All forms of action, moral and otherwise can be dealt with but it sometimes takes a long time for things to get done.