The antebellum origins of the modern constitution : slavery and the spirit of the American founding
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Bibliographic Information
The antebellum origins of the modern constitution : slavery and the spirit of the American founding
（Cambridge studies on the American Constitution）
Cambridge University Press, 2022, c2020
- : pbk
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Note
First published in hardback, 2020
Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-269) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, Abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, Antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. The Constitutional Imaginaries of the Missouri Crisis
- 2. The Declaration of Independence and Black Citizenship in the 1820s
- 3. Abolitionism and the Constitution in the 1830s
- 4. The Slaveholding South and the Constitutionalization of Slavery
- 5. Theories of the Federal Compact in the 1830s
- 6. Slavery, The District of Columbia, and the Constitution
- 7. The Congressional Crisis of 1836
- 8: The Compact and the Election of 1836
- 9. The Afterlife of the Compact of 1836
- Conclusion.
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