Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (review)

David L. Lightner has written a valuable analysis of the coming of the American Civil War. Working under the assumption that controversies surrounding slavery were the primary causes of the conflict, he offers new interpretive insights about those disputes. In particular, he asserts that the power of the Federal government to regulate commerce was a potential weapon that could have been used to regulate or even abolish the interstate trade in slaves. Observing that most previous scholars have neglected this part of the debates in the antebellum period, Lightner feels strongly that he has uncovered a key element in threat that Lincoln’s election held for the South.

The author starts this study with a short description of the practice of interstate trade in human beings. Pointing out that it was a growing phenomenon in the expanding young nation that many observers—North and South—found disturbing. He follows this essay with the beginning of his narrative that examines the debates of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the creation of the new government. Lightner makes it clear that the clause eliminating slave imports in 1808 was a compromise between northern and southern states. The implementation of this provision prompted a heated debate about the internal transport of slaves that led to battle over the entry of Missouri into the Union and the Compromise of 1820 that allowed this to happen.

In an extended chapter, Lightner provides a useful summary of the Supreme Court’s role in the slave transportation discussion. Surveying the Court’s discussions and rulings from 1820 to 1860, Lightner concludes that “the Supreme Court never made a definitive ruling as to whether Congress could interfere with the interstate slave trade” (88). John Marshall and his colleagues avoided taking any stand on the issue largely because it would inflame southern public opinion and weaken both the Court and the Union. The Taney Court appeared to be more willing to take on the issue, but the wide diversity of opinion obviated any opportunity for these justices to articulate a final judgment.

The author then examines the rise of the white abolitionist movement in some detail. As the activists grew in number, their perspectives reflected their increasingly diverse backgrounds. One of the few issues that they could all agree upon was that the interstate slave trade was inhumane and the most vulnerable feature of enslavement. In some detail, he demonstrates how Theodore Weld and Harriet Beecher Stowe used the trade in polemics and fiction to arouse northern public opinion against this commerce. This prompted petition campaigns to Congress that did not influence legislation, but kept the controversy alive. Lightner continues this discussion by examining the rise of antislavery political parties. This analysis is particularly rewarding because he emphasizes how the interstate slave trade allowed abolitionists, writers, politicians, and the clergy to reach a broad group of northerners. As good as this narrative is, it does not appear to support Lightner’s interpretive theme that the Commerce clause was a major theme in the debate.

The concluding part of this well-written book is about the crisis created by Republican success and Lincoln’s election. As Lightner correctly perceives, it was not simply the fact that the Republicans won control of the Federal government in 1860 that was the great danger. It was that the North would continue to grow much more rapidly than the slave states and the South would be an increasingly impotent minority section. It was at this point that some perceptive southerners came to recognize that the Commerce clause could be mobilized into a very effective tool for legally strangling slavery where it existed. This is an important addition to our understanding of the southern perspective during the secession crisis, but I do not find the broader argument...