How the Antislavery Constitution Won the Civil War
Was the United States Constitution of 1787 proslavery or anti-slavery? The basic contours of the academic debate remain what they were in 2007 when Professor Michael Zuckert divided the main an-tagonists into Neo-Garrisonian and Neo-Lincolnian camps. The Neo-Garrisonians maintain, as did their namesake, William Lloyd Garrison, that the Constitution was a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell.” The framers were a proslavery lot for the most part—they intended to aid the proslavery cause, and the Constitution achieved their intention. The NeoLincolnians maintain that the framers of the Constitution were mostly antislavery in intention, but concede that a few proslavery statesmen wrung limited accommodations for slavery from the Constitutional Convention.
Zuckert is critical of both sides. Wherever the Neo-Garrisonians calculate a theoretically possible proslavery effect from a constitutional provision, they impute a proslavery intention to the framers of that the provision, even in cases when evidence cannot be adduced proving intention. They underrate the importance of the framers’ deliberate avoidance of using the words “slave” or “slavery” in the text, ignoring the connection between that avoidance and their wide-spread denunciations of slavery. The Neo-Lincolnians do not sufficiently recognize that the framers fought little against the proposed accommodations to slavery. Zuckert concludes that the Constitution tolerated slavery where it existed but did not endorse it: “Within the constitutional order slavery was legal but not legitimate.” Slavery was illegitimate because it was incompatible with the Founding generation’s natural rights principles. But, although the Constitution did not explicitly recognize man’s right to hold property in man, it tacitly acknowledged and addressed the fact of slavery’s legality under state laws—at least to a limited degree—and maybe more, by contingent arrangements to return slaves to masters, to enumerate slaves in apportioning taxes and representation, and to bar prohibitions on slave importations for twenty years.
