My article on the pro-Constitution abolitionists appears in the newest issue of National Review. I explore the thought of such statesmen as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, who argued that the Constitution either already prohibited slavery, or that it was in essence an anti-slavery document and gave Congress power to restrict or even eliminate slavery, decades before the Civil War. It's a perspective known as anti-slavery constitutionalism that is completely ignored in the New York Times's recent 1619 Project articles and is often treated as disingenous or silly by historians of the period. As I argue, it is quite the opposite. Excerpt:
Many see these arguments as strained—William Wiecek, a leading scholar of anti-slavery constitutionalism, calls them “flawed and disingenuous”—but this reflects a misunderstanding of how legal arguments work.... Whatever one might conclude about anti-slavery constitutional theory, it was hardly disingenuous or implausible. And as another leading scholar of the subject, law professor Randy Barnett, concludes, it is “superior to the rival theory presented, for example, by Justice Taney in Dred Scott.” That pro-slavery ruling simply ignored the rules of legal interpretation and relied on non-textual assumptions about the Framers’ personal beliefs... Taney’s argument rested on inferences, just as the abolitionists’ arguments did. And between two theories based on inference, there was no compelling reason to choose one that doomed millions to permanent bondage over one that was consistent with the Constitution’s text, with the nation’s founding principles, and with the longstanding rule that the law must “catch at anything in favor of liberty.”
Read the rest...
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