The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy ed. by Dwight T. Pitcaithley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy ed. by Dwight T. Pitcaithley Amy L. Fluker The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy. Edited by Dwight T. Pitcaithley. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. 400 pp. Paper $24.95, isbn 978-0-7006-2626-7.) The old adage "history is written by the winners" holds little merit in the context of the American Civil War. So successful were former Confederates in recasting their defeat as an honorable endeavor to defend vaguely defined "state's rights," rather than the institution of slavery, that many Americans are angered and confused when critics of the Confederacy point out its association with white supremacy. This has been most evident in a series of recent controversies over whether to remove or to preserve monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces. When historians enter these controversies, they must counter what the public at large believes about the Confederacy and the Civil War with what the evidence shows. For this reason, Dwight T. Pitcaithley's The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy is an invaluable reference and teaching tool. Pitcaithley's anthology begins with an extensive introduction, which details the evolving national debate over slavery and the Constitution from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to the Election of 1860. This overview contextualizes the documents that follow, illustrating how persistent antagonism over slavery drove a wedge between the North and South and exposed their fundamentally different interpretations of the Constitution. Picking up from where the introduction leaves off, the documents include state declarations of secession, congressional reports, constitutional amendment proposals, and [End Page 95] various speeches dating from December 1860 to March 1861. Taken together, Pitcaithley argues, these documents demonstrate that the sectionalism that spawned the Civil War was rooted in a constitutional crisis revolving around three critical issues: the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the return of fugitive slaves, and the transportation of enslaved people through free territories and states (6). Although the content of the documents overwhelmingly supports Pitcaithley's thesis, his selections are not one-sided. The documents provide a range of contemporary perspectives on the secession crisis, reflecting regional and partisan diversity. Among the most compelling of these are the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. Not only does each state defend secession as a means of securing the property rights of slaveholders, but as Pitcaithley points out, they also clearly illustrate "the general complaint was not that the government had overreached, but that it had done too little to protect southern interests" (94). The inclusion of sixty-seven proposed constitutional amendments reveals the awareness of both Northern and Southern congressmen that slavery was the source of national discord. Their efforts to find a constitutional remedy to preserve the Union all hinged on numerous, but ultimately failed, attempts at compromising on slavery to the exclusion of virtually all else. For example, Pitcaithley observes, "of the more than three hundred articles (or subparts) represented in the sixty-seven amendments, only two suggested regulations on the collection of tariffs" (161). Although the greatest strength of The U.S. Constitution and Secession rests on Pitcaithley's introduction and on the documents themselves, there are also useful appendices. These are, in part, composed of a time line of the secession crisis and a breakdown of the votes recorded at each secession convention. Finally, The U.S. Constitution and Secession includes a brief list of discussion questions that help facilitate a more focused reading of the documents and also enhance its potential for classroom use. On the whole, The U.S. Constitution and Secession presents a comprehensive refutation of the "state's rights" justification for the secession of the Confederate states. This interpretation has dominated the popular discourse surrounding the origins of the Civil War for more than a century—etched into countless Confederate monuments, inscribed into textbooks, and profoundly influencing popular culture. Unlike monuments, however, which are highly subjective and open to misinterpretation, the documents Pitcaithley gathered into this anthology are intractable. This evidence indisputably [End Page 96] shows it was...