It’s not a hole if you can see it. The word loophole is to deceive you, as is the word “exception.” We think people in the past were somehow dumber, not smarter, than us. The person who put the phrase in was a Harvard lawyer in the Senate from the slave state Missouri in the Union. He knew what he was doing exactly. It is a permission structure that was taken for the northwest territory ordinance not used in the United States. It is an allowance to enslave and was immediately used to build law around it in states, where they made “vagrancy” a crime in 1865 in Mississippi and used it right away to arrest Blacks. The sheriff then auctioned off the contracts to pay off the bail for this “duly convicted” crime to “whites” only “at call”, on auction blocks. By the 1890s, state revenue to make budgets exceeded 50 percent from the leasing of convicts in some southern states.