The Municipal Limits of Slavery

Abstract

The Municipal Limits of Slavery National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. By James Oakes. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Pp. xxviii, 595, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $27.95.)Freedom offers a sweeping synthesis of what historians have come to call the abolitionist narrative of the American Civil War.1 James Oakes takes the title for his book from a speech delivered on the floor of the United States Senate in August 1852 by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner sought the repeal of the federal Fugitive Slave Act that had been passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850. His Freedom National speech expressed at length what had emerged over the previous decade as an antislavery historical analysis of the constitutional relationship between slavery in the Southern states and the authority of the federal government. It is the central thesis of Oakes' work that the doctrine insured a wartime progression toward universal emancipation and citizenship rights for former slaves.Oakes'thesis is particularly important as it relates to Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to recruit black troops. Like most historians, writes Oakes, I have always believed that the purpose of the war shifted 'from Union to emancipation,' but over the course of my research that familiar transition vanished like dust in the wind, and I have been unable to recover it(p. xxiii). War Democrats experienced a profound shift as their willingness to support a war to preserve the Union advanced a Republican war to free the slaves. But for Republicans, Oakes insists, the pursuit of emancipation and citizenship rights directly fulfilled the promise of the doctrine.Oakes draws on an extensive secondary literature and on published primary sources to locate the origins and trace the antebellum development of the doctrine. By the time Sumner delivered his 1852 speech, the doctrine had been elaborated upon by antislavery politicians for more than a decade. Its principal architect was Salmon P. Chase, a leading figure in antislaveiy politics who served as Lincoln's Treasury Secretary during the Civil War and replaced Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1864. Chase presented his first extended exposition of the doctrine in his 1837 defense of a fugitive slave named Matilda. At the time, Chase was a young lawyer who had moved west from his native New Hampshire, to settle in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the Matilda Case, Chase defended the fugitive and her abolitionist benefactor, James G. Bimey. Bimey had been a slave owner in Alabama before embracing the abolitionist cause and moving to Cincinnati during the first wave of antislavery agitation following the formation of the American Antislavery Society in 1833. When Birney gave Matilda employment in his home he did so as the prominent editor of the Cincinnati Philanthropist. Chase defended Matilda and Birney: the former from being returned to slavery and the latter from charges that he harbored a fugitive in violation of Ohio's fugitive slave law.At the core of Chase's defense of Matilda and Bimey was the insistence that the federal Constitution neither sanctioned slavery nor recognized the right to hold properly in persons. Chase conceded that the fugitive clause of the Constitution dealt with the relationship between master and servants, but it had nothing to do with property in persons. The fugitive clause referred to a Person held to Service or Labour, not to property in slaves. Chase conceded as well that the Constitution did not prohibit slavery in the original states. But, by offering slavery no specific recognition, the national compact left the institution as the drafters found it, confined to the existing slave states where municipal laws enforced the right to hold property in persons. …