No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding, With a New Preface

by Sean Wilentz

Overview

“Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book.”
—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation’s founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass pointed to the framers’ refusal to validate what they called “property in man.” No Property in Man has opened a fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Civil War. It drives straight to the heart of the single most contentious issue in all of American history.

“Revealing and passionately argued…[Wilentz] insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been…‘misconstrued’ for over 200 years.”
—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, New York Times

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674241428
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Series:	The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures , #18
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	224,120
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

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

Preface ix

A Note on Terminology xvii

Introduction 1

1 Slavery, Property, and Emancipation in Revolutionary America 25

2 The Federal Convention and the Curse of Heaven 58

3 Slavery, Antislavery, and the Struggle for Ratification 115

4 To the Missouri Crisis 152

5 Antislavery, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War 206

Epilogue 263

Notes 271

Index 337

Editorial Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…revealing and passionately argued…

The New York Times Book Review - Khalil Gibran Muhammad

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