The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War by Michael F. Conlin (review)

The title of this book points to both its purpose and its argument. Michael Conlin has written a tightly focused yet sweeping overview of the constitutional arguments that roiled the United States during the years preceding the Civil War. He believes these disagreements regarding the text and interpretation of the Constitution were central to the process that eventually resulted in the nation’s disintegration. “If the Constitution did not cause the Civil War by itself, that four-thousand-word document certainly played a key role—perhaps the starring role—in aggregating the sectional conflict over slavery that resulted in the Civil War,” he writes (xv).

One might reasonably expect that The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War is therefore an abstract sort of study, concerned only with the world of ideas among intellectuals, with an occasional court decision and lawyer’s brief. But this is not at all what Conlin is about. His underlying thesis is that constitutional controversy mattered precisely because the controversies were not mere abstractions among elites; they resonated with ordinary Americans as well. Conlin was struck by the sophistication and care invested in constitutional erudition by what he termed “everyday Americans” who “participated fully in what a group of concerned Georgia businessmen called the ‘difficult constitutional question’ of slavery and union” (xx). In this, Conlin explicitly rejects the idea that such analysis must focus only on professionals. Instead, he argues, the sectional crisis was steeped in sophisticated debates regarding the Constitution’s text by Americans from all walks of life. “Ordinary mid-nineteenth-century Americans were keen to offer their own interpretations [of the Constitution] and to defend them against all comers,” Conlin observes (37).

Turning to the specifics of these controversies, Conlin explores the different ways that northern and southern Americans approached the thorny issues of the framers’ original intent when they wrote the Constitution and how each side grappled with (or celebrated) Founding Fathers who owned slaves. Perhaps not surprisingly, northerners and southerners developed very different interpretations of the historical record, the character of slaveholding framers (James Madison in particular), and specific passages such as the Preamble’s “We the People” or the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Conlin explains: “Abolitionists believed that slave labor was a prima facie violation of the Fifth Amendment as the enslaved were denied their personal liberty,” while slaveholders latched onto the words after “liberty,” arguing that “the Fifth Amendment protect[ed] the right to hold slaves as it would any other type of property” (17).

Conlin time and again finds proponents and opponents of slavery engaging in such a disparate constitutional dialogue, either focusing on different provisions in the document to back their arguments or engaging in very different pro-or antislavery interpretations of the same constitutional language. Sometimes the very lack of words in the Constitution could serve a sectional agenda. “The absence of the words ‘slave,’ ‘slavery,’ and ‘slaveholder’ in the Constitution allowed some moderate abolitionists to argue disingenuously that the document did not condone servile labor,” Conlin points out (23).

The fact that northerners and southerners interpreted the Constitution’s legacy and language in different ways is not particularly revelatory; quite a large historical literature exists that explores these issues, with seminal works by historians Harold Hyman, William Wiecek, Phillip Paludan, and Herman Belz (among others). But, at the very least, Conlin has written an admirably concise primer on the constitutional dimensions of the sectional crisis. Compact and clear, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War would be a good user-friendly text for an undergraduate course on the Civil War era.

What is truly a revelation here is the depth, enthusiasm, and sophistication of these arguments among ordinary Americans. Indeed, therein lies the book’s real value. It amply demonstrates what has sometimes been termed “popular constitutionalism,” as Conlin mines the observations of newspaper editors, businessmen, merchants, and farmers...