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Commentary Conflict vs. Racial Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics James Oakes Here’s one way to write the history of race and slavery in American politics between the Revolution and the Civil War: The American Revolution unleashed a powerful antislavery movement that resulted in the abolition of slavery in every Northern state, thousands of manumissions in the Upper South, a ban on the expansion of slavery into the Northwestern territories, and eventually the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. But as quickly as this antislavery movement took hold, it just as suddenly collapsed; as impressive as its achievements were, they were also limited. Slaves in the North, for example, were freed only gradually, and even then, blacks were subjected to an increasingly restrictive series of racial discriminations. Technically, slavery was not abolished in the Northwest territories. Manumissions in the South stopped as quickly as they started. The new Constitution, far from completing the emancipation process, all but strangled it with a series of protections for slavery. Rather than ban the Atlantic slave trade outright, for example, the proslavery Constitution actually prohibited the new national government from interfering with slave imports for a generation—with the result that a huge wave of African slaves flooded into the newly United States. Thus did the antislavery impulse of the Revolution wither and die after 1790. For forty years, blacks organized and struggled to keep the antislavery movement alive, but not until after 1830 did radical abolitionism bring the movement back to life, and not for another generation did it begin to bear fruit. The villain of this piece—the worm in the apple of Revolutionary antislavery—was white racism. Whites may have subscribed to the abstract proposition that ‘‘all men are created equal,’’ but when 292 James Oakes faced with the actual prospect of living with freed blacks as their equals, white Americans shrank back in horror. What flowered in the wake of the American Revolution was not its libertarian radicalism but a racist backlash against it. Thisisastoryfamiliartoallhistoriansoftheearlyrepublic,buttheessaysinthis volume and the recent body of scholarship they represent suggest a different version of the history of race and slavery in American politics between the Revolution and the Civil War. This new version of early American history is still being constructed,buttheoutlinesarebecomingclearandtheylooksomethinglikethis: The American Revolution set in motion a long and bitterly divisive struggle over slavery and race in the new nation. A multifaceted Revolutionary ideology provided opponents of slavery with a powerful argument for universal freedom, but at the same time it inspired a popular defense of the inviolable rights of property that became the bulwark of proslavery politics. Out of this conflict came a series of struggles, the outcomes of which reflected the shifting balance of power in national and Northern politics. Where slaveholders were most powerful , slavery could scarcely be touched. Where they were weakest, slavery was quickly abolished. Where the balance was more even—in states like New York and New Jersey—more protracted struggles took place, with the opponents of slavery eventually winning the day. Slave imports were banned in the Northwest, but the slaveholders who were already there waged a campaign to lift the ban, only to be beaten back. Antislavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention struggled to keep slavery out of the new charter but were checked by aggressive slaveholders who forced a series of compromises. The result was a Constitution that was no less ambiguous than Revolutionary ideology, and that ambiguity led to sustained conflict over the precise status of slave property. From the beginning , the slaveholders insisted that human property was just like any other property, and as such was protected as a constitutional right. But the Constitution speaks of slaves as ‘‘persons’’ rather than property, and in the very act of singling slavery out for special protection the Constitution treated slaves as different from other property. For slavery’s opponents, this distinction stripped slavery of the ‘‘natural’’ right to protection that the Constitution otherwise guaranteed to land and houses. Instead, antislavery advocates held that slavery was protected more by the principle of federalism than by the sacred right of property. This difference meant that the national government had the right to outlaw the importation of slaves after 1808 and prohibit the expansion of slavery in the Western territories—restrictions that the Constitution did not specifically allow for any other form of property. On the other hand, federalism also decreed that the national government could not interfere with...

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