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  • Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War
  • Steven Deyle
Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. By David L. Lightner (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006) 240 pp. $45.00

In this important new study, Lightner looks at the decades-long debate and legal battle concerning federal regulation of the interstate slave trade within the United States. According to Lightner, "This is the story of a constitutional loophole and of a law that never was" (ix). At issue was the question of whether or not the U.S. Constitution granted to Congress the right to regulate, and even prohibit, the interstate traffic in enslaved human commodities. Many of the northerners opposed to slavery believed that Congress did have this power, and they also thought that such a prohibition would bring about the downfall of the entire southern slave system. Although such an act was never passed by Congress, Lightner argues "that southern anxiety over the threat to the interstate slave trade was an important element in precipitating the secession crisis and the Civil War" (xi).

The strongest element of this work is Lightner's extensive primary research into, and discussion of, the various constitutional interpretations and legal arguments offered by both opponents and proponents of slavery. Especially noteworthy is his examination of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the original intent of the framers regarding this issue. Unfortunately, little was said at the time because of the founders' inability to foresee the rise of this traffic, which did not fully develop until after the closing of the African slave trade in 1808. Lightner argues that the framers did not intend to grant Congress the right to abolish the interstate slave trade, though they inadvertently did. The full implications of this "loophole" did not appear until the Missouri Crisis of 1819/ 20. From that point onward, it became a primary focus of the emerging anti-slavery movement in the North, and, by the tumultuous 1850s, it dominated the fears of southern slave owners.

Lightner successfully employs legal theory, but his overall argument could have benefited from additional research in other disciplines. He effectively explores the role that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston, 1852) played in developing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, but he does not fully examine the role that literature in the South played in the defense of slavery, or the role that the slave trade played in the southern economy. The interstate slave trade helped to raise the economic value of slaves throughout the region, making slave property the most valuable form of capital investment in the South.

Many of the points in this book have already appeared in Lightner's numerous published articles, although they are especially effective when discussed together in a coherent argument. Most important, this work is a valuable contribution to our growing understanding of how the domestic slave trade influenced secession and the Civil War. [End Page 134]

Steven Deyle
University of Houston
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