The United States was founded as a Slave Empire; its economy and culture was based on a legal system that not only allowed, but upheld and defended the ownership of one class of people - as property - by another. The Second Constitution guaranteed the legal protection of the slave system, and the privileged class of white property owning males, North and South, nurtured itself on a slave economy.

Opposition to slavery by Abolitionist radicals existed from the begining, but came into prominence in the 1830s. By the end of the Civil War, the slave system in the South had been abolished, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were adopted, ostensibly to create out of a Slave and Commerce Constitution - a Liberty and Rights Constitution.

But the hope of such an outcome was short-lived. The immensly enriched merchant class coopted legislatures and courts with the growing power of the corporate lobby and the appointment of corporate lawyers to the bench, and soon they succeeded in coopting the very Constitutional Amendment once thought to bestow denied rights on freed slaves. The railroad judges now sitting on the Court conspired to "find" within the language of the 14th Amendment, an artificial entity embodying the wealth and property of the new Corporate Class. And on these corporations the judges bestowed Constitutional protections, referring to corporations themselves as "persons." 

Here you can read selections that discuss this remarkable and well-concealed transformation, from a Slave State to a Corporate State.

Josephson on the hijacking of the 14th Amendment

James B. Weaver on the Civil War as Corporate Revolution

Model Brief to Eliminate Corporate Rights

Toward A Definition of the Corporate State -- from Arthur Selwyn Miller's book "The Corporate State: Private Governments and the American Constitution"

The Wages of Resting Fundamental Rights on the Commerce Clause -- William E. Forbath, The New Deal Constitution in Exile

(Cartoon - Matt Wuerker, from Building Unions)