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Tavis: Lawrence Goldstone is a noted historian and constitutional scholar who's the author of one of the year's most acclaimed history books. The book is called 'Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution.' Now out in paperback. Dr. Goldstone, nice to have you on the program.

Dr. Lawrence Goldstone: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Tavis: Let me go right, my pleasure. Let me go right back to the beginning here, the beginning of this place called America, and this thing called the Constitutional Convention, which had at its epicenter a conversation about this institution called slavery. Take it.

Goldstone: Well, they didn't actually have that much of a conversation. They tried to avoid (unintelligible).

Tavis: Tried to talk around it.

Goldstone: Yeah, and in the final document that came out, the word slavery or slave wasn't mentioned. First time slavery was actually mentioned in the Constitution was in the amendment that abolished it. A lot of scholarship takes the lack of mention as lack of interest, or lack of importance. But I think if you actually read the debates, and read what these men said, and you see them as real people, slavery really jumps off the page at you.

Tavis: So you write about this, obviously you've written the book, you're the expert here. There wasn't really a deep conversation about it. What I meant to suggest was it clearly was at the epicenter of the times.

Goldstone: Absolutely, absolutely.

Tavis: It's at the epicenter of the times, which raises this question. How could something as, well, something like slavery be at the epicenter of this place called America, and yet be walked around, talked around, and not addressed in this document forthcoming called the Constitution?

Goldstone: I think there's two reasons. First of all, obviously, it's not the most glorious piece of our history. And it isn't something that people like to talk about. They didn't like talking about it in 1787. They didn't like talking about it in 1887 or 1987. And people really don't like talking about it now. But I think a lot of the problem comes from the scholarship tends to examine the finished product, the finished Constitution, the piece of paper.

Analyzing the clauses, Article I means this, or it doesn't mean this. It allows this, it doesn't allow this. And because slavery isn't mentioned, it doesn't get, it isn't focused on. The other thing is that when we talk about the founders, we talk about them as if they're lofty and philosophic. Like James Madison is nothing more than a brain with feet. These were real people.

They had real economic issues to deal with; they had social issues; they were very attuned to class. They were very attuned to the regions in which they lived. And they came to Philadelphia with the same motives that people come to now. It's interesting, Tavis, when I left graduate school, I didn't go into academia, I went to Wall Street. And when I was - I worked in a trading firm. One of these high-powered, profit-oriented places.

And when I sat in a meeting in that firm, in a closed room, like the closed room in Philadelphia, with these blood-sucking, profit-motive sharks, it occurred to me that the dynamic in that meeting, in that room, was closer to what the dynamic must have been in the closed room in the statehouse in Philadelphia than what I was reading in most of the treatments.

Tavis: Explain what you mean by that.

Goldstone: Well, people are there because of real interests. The people in 1787 had the same motivations we have now. They wanted economic opportunity...

Tavis: Money, let me guess. (Laugh)

Goldstone: Well, it's money, but it's also...

Tavis: It's always money.

Goldstone: And security.

Tavis: Yeah.

Goldstone: Personal security. They wanted to know that they weren't gonna be wiped out. The threat from England was present; there was a growing threat from France. So the kinds of things that we are debating now in committee rooms in Congress are very much the same as these people. But when you read a lot of the treatments, what you see, even among very, very competent scholars, is well, this one followed Montescue, and this one followed Locke.

As if the United States was this nation of citizen philosophers, standing around and debating issues. And I think that it is much more likely that they were people, just like we are people, and that people from South Carolina came to protect rice growers, which was their staple crop. And the Virginians came to protect the tobacco industry, and the northerners were shippers. And that it is much more likely that they came with that notion.

Tavis: I accept that. What troubles me, though, Professor, is that you have a bunch of men sitting in this room who, while we look in retrospect upon them, to your point, as lofty and philosophical and great Americans, they were, in fact, a bunch of, let's be frank about it, White guys sitting around a room who had no conscience, or consciousness, about the maltreatment that they were offering to these other human beings.

There was only one guy, you argue in the book, (laugh) that said, 'This ain't right. This ain't right.' I don't know if he said this ain't right, but there's one guy who argued, this is not the right thing to do.

Goldstone: Yes, Luther Martin, the convention drunk. Luther Martin is a fascinating character. He was attorney general of Maryland for 30 years, he won cases when he was just, could hardly stand up because of his drinking. In fact, when he stopped drinking, he was much less of a lawyer. But he was also very much a states rights person. Very much against the Constitution on principle anyway.

But he was one of the few people there whose personal morality would not allow compromise for union. I think that's what you need to take from this. That people walked in there, it wasn't that they were immoral or amoral. But it was that there was a price to pay for union. And that price was different, depending on which part of the country you came from.

And almost everyone was willing to pay it. Northerners were willing to hold their nose and go along with someone like the Three-Fifths Clause, where they had to, talking about man's inhumanity to man vis a vis slavery, which they did in public, they had to acknowledge that Black people were at least partly property. And southerners making the same three-fifths compromise had to accept that slaves were partly people.

So all of these, it was just an exercise in pragmatism. And it shouldn't be surprising that people behave in a pragmatic manner. We do now. We don't expect our current people in government, well, the ones that do act ideologically have just been refuted by the electorate. We don't want our people - we don't want our leaders to simply be ideologues.

Tavis: You remind us that various states in the north and south had different ways of viewing this on economic terms. Some estates wanted to get their slaves from one region of the world. Other states wanted to get their slaves from another place. Talk to me about those fights.

Goldstone: Well, when people talk about slavery, they talk about the slave economy as if it's one economy. But there were two economies. Virginia, the upper south, grew tobacco. Tobacco was grown in rolling fields, slaves, there was low mortality. The slave population just exploded. And it had gotten so big that at the time of the convention, it was generally assumed that there were more slaves in Virginia than free people.

In the south, they grew rice, and rice was grown in swamps. And the swamps were horrible. It was grown essentially from June to September, there were mosquitoes and leeches and snakes, and the mortality was enormous. So the South Carolinians needed a constant influx of new slaves. The Virginians, on the other hand, they had an excess. Well, the natural thing, of course, is when there's an oversupply in one place and an undersupply in the other, that the domestic slave trade should handle it.

And that's what the Virginians wanted. So the Virginians were in the position of going to - oh, and the South Carolinians wanted to get their slaves from the cheapest place they could. And the cheapest place was Africa. It was much cheaper to import slaves...

Tavis: Than to buy them from Virginia.

Goldstone: ...than to buy them from Virginia. So, South Carolina goes to the convention wanting to protect both slavery and the slave trade, which are two different things. Virginia goes to the convention wanting to protect slavery, but wants to end the slave trade. So there are certain pronouncements by Virginia delegates which seem to be anti-slavery, George Mason in particular, which are actually not against slavery but against the slave trade. And that's another thing you see when you start reading the debates from a human side. That the slave trade and slavery were two very different things.

Tavis: I don't mean to be simplistic here, and I don't say this to be cynical, but reading this book again, one gets the opinion, one gets the impression, that the way that we get turned off today to everything being about money, to being about the almighty dollar, is quite frankly what this country was all about from the very beginning. Is that too cynical for you?

Goldstone: No, it's not. I suppose no, but is there a society that isn't? Was Rome about, if you say wealth instead of money, was ancient Rome about amassing wealth? Were the Greeks about amassing wealth? Most of them, maybe not Socrates? Was England about amassing wealth? Yeah, I think it's true. But there's a 'so what' aspect to it. I think that anytime somebody discusses a society and says they're not about money as a whole, they're not about wealth, they're not about making a better life for themselves? That's what wealth is, really. Then I'm always a little curious, and I'm a little cynical about that point of view.

Tavis: I can't do all this in one conversation, as I mentioned at the top of the show, as we work our way up to February and the four-hundredth commemoration of the Jamestown settlement, which the state of Virginia, the commonwealth, will commemorate all of next year. And I'm a part of a number of things there, along with their honorary chairperson, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

I'll be in Virginia a lot doing stuff around this. But I wanna have a number of conversations on television. In just 30 seconds or so, tell me what you think the value is of us even having these conversations 400 years later.

Goldstone: I think the value is that these issues never leave us. For example, our Constitution did not prevent our Civil War. We did not deal with slavery. We made the compromises for union. We did not put off a civil war; we did not avoid a civil war; we simply put it off for 75 years. We're in Iraq now. We had them write a constitution, because the constitution was going to prevent their civil war.

Well, their constitution is not gonna prevent their civil war any more than our constitution prevented ours. These issues, the way of looking at history, never goes away. And you always learn, and you can apply it to situations in your current life, in your current situation, all the time.

Tavis: The book is called 'Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution,' written by Lawrence Goldstone. As I said a moment ago, we will have any number of these conversations about what it means to be in America 400 years later, between now and 2007 - and into 2007. So, Mr. Goldstone, thank you for kicking off this series of conversations. Nice to have you here.

Goldstone: Well, thank you.

Tavis: It's my pleasure. Up next on this program, from the subways of New York to a hit CD, the inspiring story of the duo Nuttin' But Stringz. Stay with us.