The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

Abstract

The relationship between the struggle against slavery and the Constitution remains a fraught historical subject. The Constitution was written by political elites who were fiercely divided over the question of slavery, and the legal groundwork for slavery it provided in the antebellum era remained ambiguous. As a text, the Constitution undeniably enabled a proslavery interpretation of federal law, but the debate about the role of constitutionalism in enabling or undermining slavery as political conflict over slavery's legitimacy escalated has remained contentious.In The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, James Oakes accounts for the complexities and contradictions of constitutional thought, but nevertheless cuts through this debate with impressive clarity. He frames constitutionalism as a set of competing political traditions that took form through activism and fierce political struggle. In Oakes's view, antislavery constitutionalism constituted the foundations of the ideology underlying political battles against slavery, and he takes seriously the prolonged, fiercely contested construction of this constitutional tradition as a significant political force in the fight for abolition.Oakes quickly moves beyond debates over the text of the Constitution itself and instead examines antislavery constitutionalism as a political tradition that emerged from active legal and political conflict. Starting from the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he identifies consistent efforts by political opponents of slavery to pressure the federal government to undermine slavery through Constitutional power. Antislavery constitutionalists, both politicians and grassroots activists, vied to make the Constitution a legal foundation for antislavery politics. They strategically targeted legal tensions regarding the rights of enslaved persons, such as due process and other rights of citizenship, in political battles over policy ranging from state constitutions to the Fugitive Slave Act to the legitimacy of slavery on international waters. Through these political struggles, opponents of slavery worked to reframe the Constitution under a new mantra: “freedom is the rule, slavery is the exception.”The remainder of the book positions Abraham Lincoln and his Republican administration firmly within this tradition of antislavery constitutionalism. Examining Lincoln's consistent commitment to abolishing slavery and extending citizenship rights to Black people in the territories, protecting due process for fugitive slaves, and making slavery the exception under federal sovereignty, Oakes argues that Lincoln's allegiance to the political project of emancipation was more enduring and persistent than previous scholars have acknowledged. As threats of secession and the subsequent Civil War opened new opportunities to confront slavery, Lincoln's presidential administration advanced toward emancipation by using military contraband practices to free slaves through martial power and dismantling fugitive slave law enforcement. In his final chapter, Oakes reexamines Lincoln's fixation on encouraging gradual abolition in border states early in the war, arguing that this gradualist strategy was not rooted in hesitancy about abolition but rather fit into an aggressive strategy of joint military and political pressure to secure emancipation through constitutional means. State-by-state pressure for local emancipation created the groundwork to pursue national abolition with the thirteenth amendment.Much of The Crooked Path to Abolition retreads well-explored territory, focusing on a relatively narrow set of political actors. Oakes's framework of antislavery constitutionalism allows for a broad view of political struggle that accounts for grassroots movement-building and activism, but grassroots pressure breaks up his history only intermittently. Most of the text focuses on battles waged by political and military leadership. The book's principal attention to Lincoln fits into an exhaustive historical literature on the president that has debated his commitment to emancipation and racial equality for decades.Still, Oakes makes an impressive intervention into this crowded scholarship. His significant contribution is not in his recovery of Lincoln's character; indeed, he acknowledges extensively the limitations of Lincoln's ideological commitment to racial equality. Rather, he shows that Lincoln's dedication to emancipation emerged from a complex political tradition that was powerfully committed to the end of slavery. Slave states seceded not as overreaction to an undefined abolitionist bogeyman but in response to a persistent, strategic political project of emancipation with Lincoln at its head. With the Confederacy and the Civil War still raging sites of conflict in popular memory today, James Oakes provides a timely, valuable perspective. His book is an accessible, incisive examination of Lincoln and the Civil War that accounts for the murky nuances and contingencies on the path to emancipation while nevertheless unapologetically framing radical structural conflict over slavery as the central impetus for secession and war.