No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding by Sean Wilentz (review)

The text of the U.S. Constitution did not spell out the word "slave" prior to the Reconstruction Amendments. Nor did its first framers adopt a human-chattel clause guaranteeing a national right to own people. As James Madison self-reported in his posthumously published "Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787," it would be "wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."¹ This well-known constitutional absence (and quotation) has hardly troubled a scholarly consensus on the proslavery force of the framers' handiwork. The numerical incorporation of enslaved people in slave-state federal representation, provision for rendition of interstate fugitives from slavery, protection of the transatlantic slave trade, and promise of military might against insurrections showed that the Convention could ably weave slavery into the national fabric without saying its name. As soft antislavery sentiments yielded to hard bargaining behind closed doors, the Constitution embedded southern states in a robust federal polity and empowered their slaveholding leaders to govern.

Sean Wilentz sees a more inspiring Founding in the words that framers declined to use. No Property in Man, a short and sweeping account of slavery's constitutional place from the Revolution through Emancipation, presents Wilentz's vision of the original meaning and subsequent power of the textual absence of "slave." The Princeton historian insists that a majority in the Convention hewed assiduously to his book's titular principle, making good on Madison's remark, even as they framed architecture strengthening the enslavement of those designated as "other persons."² As Wilentz puts it: "While they had no choice in the moment but to tolerate and even protect slavery where it existed, they would prepare for a nation in which there was no slavery, which would mean refusing to validate slavery's legitimacy in the Constitution" (59). This conscious refusal, undertaken not to obscure slavery but to deny it any constitutional sanction, laid the cornerstone of abolition. Wilentz's framers "left room" (2) for antislavery politics and "bequeathed grounds upon which slavery's expansion would later be challenged, with the ultimate objective of destroying American slavery completely" (22). All this rendered the Constitution a "paradox," not a compact with hell (22). And it explains why Wilentz laments that "historians still cling to [abolitionist William Lloyd] Garrison's denunciation" of the instrument as such (12). Because the Constitution's original meaning—something he largely treats as defined by authorial understanding—withheld recognition of slavery, later generations of antislavery constitutionalists stood on the right side of historical truth while proslavery interpretations defied the framers' will. Before the Civil War, Wilentz contends, Abraham Lincoln "closely studied Madison's notes" (254) and "sensed how the framers … offered his generation the instruments to cut out what he called the 'cancer' of slavery" (242). Secession followed his election because slaveholders could not endure a government that vindicated the Constitution's antislavery silence. At its heart, then, No Property in Man seeks to exorcise from contemporary historians the ghost of Garrison—as well as those of proslavery figures John Calhoun and Roger Taney, whose constitutional understandings Wilentz asserts rested on the same false notion of the Founding.

This is a book thick with arguments. It tells of Revolutionary-era discourse against slavery, debates in the Convention, heated analysis advanced during ratification, and claims levied amid decades of political conflict over slavery; and it is replete with Wilentz's strong interpretive voice across these moments. No Property in Man convincingly foregrounds the importance of constitutional positions in configuring formal politics that culminated in secession. It shows how passing time and new sectional issues collided with original choices. Its tight focus on arguments about the constitutional recognition of enslaved people as property yields a particularly lucid approach for linking together issues and fights over half a...