No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz Wang Xi No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. By Sean Wilentz. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 350. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-674-97222-3.) Inspired by Justice Thurgood Marshall’s comments on “a deep historical conundrum concerning the Constitution and the freedom struggles that followed,” Sean Wilentz has embarked on exploring the question of how a proslavery Constitution, as generally believed, eventually became “an instrument for antislavery politics” (p. x). Given the voluminous and seemingly exhaustive literature on such subjects as the constitutional founding, the history of antislavery, and the politics leading to the Civil War, Wilentz seems to set himself an unimaginably difficult task. The result of his heroic endeavors, however, is a brilliant and groundbreaking achievement. No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding not only substantially revises our understanding of the original intent of the Constitution’s framers on the issues of slavery and its containment but also critically rewrites the history of the nation’s antislavery struggle. To be sure, Wilentz does not deny that the original Constitution contained many concessions that enabled the continuation of slavery and the augmentation of slaveholders’ power after the nation’s founding, but he aims at uncovering and deciphering “the crucial subtlety” of the framers who had “deliberately excluded any validation of property in man” and acknowledged slavery as nothing more than “a creation of state laws” (pp. 1, 2). The Constitution, instead of being a thoroughly and completely proslavery document, had in fact produced a paradoxical outcome that acknowledged slavery where it had existed without nationally sanctioning it. This paradox, according [End Page 458] to Wilentz, became “the constitutional basis for the politics that in time led to slavery’s destruction” (p. 5). The five-chapter book primarily covers the history of antislavery within the established constitutional and political venues from the Revolutionary era to the secession crisis. Antislavery activists outside the political system, such as Quakers and Garrisonian abolitionists, are also discussed, but not as the story’s protagonists. The most original and insightful contribution, in this reader’s view, is Wilentz’s discussion, in chapter 2, of how the antislavery and proslavery delegates of various backgrounds struggled, through the debates over the three well-known slavery-related compromises (regarding the three-fifths clause, the Atlantic slave trade, and fugitive slaves), to determine whether slaves should be defined as property to be protected by the Constitution. “‘[T]he idea that there could be no property in men’” was introduced into and affirmed by the Constitution, ironically not as a grand philosophy of antislavery but more as the result of James Madison’s effort to clarify a technical glitch questioned during the debate over the slave trade clause (p. 97). But Madison’s clarification, though not intentionally done, “did sustain a principle that most of the delegates honored: that property in man had no place in national law” (pp. 98–99). Along with the framers’ insistence on congressional authority to limit slavery’s expansion, the constitutional exclusion of the rights to “property in man” provided two usable ideas and mechanisms that were invoked by later generations to serve antislavery causes of various kinds. Covering the congressional debates over the organization of key territories (the Northwest, Southwest, Mississippi, Louisiana Purchase, and Mexican Cession), the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, and the party realignment after the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Wilentz devotes his later chapters (chapters 3–5) to highlighting how different generations of antislavery activists, both inside and outside the political system, enlisted these original antislavery ideas and mechanisms to confront the proslavery aggressions of the Slave Power. The book’s ending is especially powerful as Wilentz dramatically reveals how Abraham Lincoln and South Carolina’s declaration of secession (and, later, the Confederate constitution) contested the U.S. Constitution’s original intent on handling property in man. The contest effectively affirms the validity of Wilentz’s important rediscovery of a usable past that resets the beginning of...