No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding

by Sean Wilentz

Overview

A radical reconstruction of the founders’ debate over slavery and the Constitution.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation’s founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers’ work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery’s legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation.

Wilentz’s controversial and timely reconsideration upends orthodox views of the Constitution. He describes the document as a tortured paradox that abided slavery without legitimizing it. This paradox lay behind the great political battles that fractured the nation over the next seventy years. As Southern Fire-eaters invented a proslavery version of the Constitution, antislavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, proclaimed antislavery versions based on the framers’ refusal to validate what they called “property in man.”

No Property in Man invites fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Confederacy’s defeat. It drives straight to the heart of the most contentious and enduring issue in all of American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674916050
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/06/2018
Series:	The Nathan I. Huggins lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on American history and politics, including The Rise of American Democracy, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Politicians and the Egalitarians, chosen as Best History Book of the Year by Kirkus and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Wilentz’s writings on American music have earned him two Grammy nominations and two Deems-Taylor-ASCAP awards.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface A Note on Terminology Introduction 1. Slavery, Property, and Emancipation in Revolutionary America 2. The Federal Convention and the Curse of Heaven 3. Slavery, Antislavery, and the Struggle for Ratification 4. To the Missouri Crisis 5. Antislavery, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War Epilogue Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

…revealing and passionately argued…

The New York Times Book Review - Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Examines the debate over the legal status of enslaved people that began with the writing of the Constitution and continued up to the Civil War—a period in American history in which he finds an important lesson for how to achieve political change in a democracy…No American historian of his generation has written so well on so many different subjects; few even come close.

The Nation

Will reshape American thinking on a deep American matter…Goes to the heart of the present-day consternation over the national identity and its history.

The Tablet - Paul Berman

What does Wilentz know that others have gotten so terribly wrong about the founding connection between slavery and racism? In his revealing and passionately argued book, he insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been ‘slighted’ and ‘misconstrued’ for over 200 years.

New York Times - Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Sean Wilentz offers readers a forceful argument, an attentiveness to competing perspectives, an appreciation for nuance and irony, a thorough mastery of pertinent sources, and elegant writing. This is a book that both specialists and generalists will profit from reading.

Randall Kennedy

Wilentz shows what we dearly need to see now as much as ever: that slavery and antislavery were joined at the hip in the American founding, as well as in the tragic history that led to the Civil War. The Constitution possessed fatal complicity with racial slavery but also sowed seeds of its destruction. Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book.

David W. Blight

Like Sherlock Holmes noticing the dog that didn’t bark, Sean Wilentz discerns the revealing absence of a property right in slaves that hardline southerners failed to secure at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Clearly and without apology, Wilentz explains the framers’ familiar compromises with slavery. But until now no historian has examined the critical concession antislavery delegates refused to make. There would be no constitutional right of property in man.

James Oakes

Was the U.S. Constitution, as the South Carolinian states-man John C. Calhoun believed, a pro-slavery document, or did it, as President Abraham Lincoln argued, deny slavery a place in national law and point toward abolition? Although most Americans outside the academy would assume that Calhoun was wrong and Lincoln right, the contrary view has gained so much ground among academics in recent years that Wilentz’s qualified endorsement of Lincoln’s interpretation is both bracing and brave. Wilentz’s thoroughly researched argument serves as a useful example of solid scholarship and effective writing on a sensitive topic.

Foreign Affairs - Walter Russell Mead

An insightful account of slavery’s place in United States politics from the nation’s founding to the start of the Civil War. One of the leading political historians of our time, Wilentz draws on his extensive knowledge of the period to give readers fresh insights into historians’ long-running debate over slavery’s place in American politics.

Labour - Frank Towers

Demonstrating that the Constitution both protected slavery and left open the possibility of an antislavery politics, Wilentz’s careful and insightful analysis helps us understand how Americans who hated slavery, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, could come to see the Constitution as an ally in their struggle.

Eric Foner

Stimulating…draws on letters, speeches and public debates to enlarge our sense of slavery’s political dimension in the founding period.

Wall Street Journal - David S. Reynolds

2018-06-27
The Bancroft Prize-winning historian pieces together how the Constitution set the stage for Civil War.The Constitution, notes Wilentz (American History/Princeton Univ.; The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics, 2017), allowed slavery without authorizing it. The framers excluded any mention of "property in men," slavery's bedrock principle. That exclusion made slavery a creation of individual states, not a national institution. Since the framers conducted their business secretly, opposite sides could create contrary ipressions from the same phrasing, interpreting the language to suit their purpose. Seeing control as an invasion of property rights, Southern leaders fought against ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the assessment of import taxes, and national abolition. In South Carolina, Charles Pinkney fought for the rights of slaveholders. To overcome fear of a Northern majority, his answer was to have representation based on wealth. Failing that, he proposed a three-fifths rule, whereby slaves were counted as 3/5 of a man. What the Constitution finally passed was a 20-year ban on abolition—a period during which South Carolina and Georgia imported more African slaves than in any other like period—the 3/5 clause, and the fugitive slave clause, protecting a master's right to reclaim escaped slaves. Those opposed to slavery argued that man's right to personal liberty should override any property law, and slavery robbed slaves of their right to property in their own persons. When it came to ratifying the Constitution, it wasn't slavery but rather the division of powers between the state and federal governments that caused many to pause. This astute study of the attempts to create a nation including all the Colonies shows how difficult a task they had. While many condemned slavery, they also knew it could only be abolished gradually. Almost by necessity, Wilentz's account is occasionally repetitive in order to show how nuanced each argument became as compromises were reached.The narrative may be difficult going for general readers, but it's undeniably enlightening and well worth the effort.

Kirkus Reviews