Review by Choice Review
Wilentz (Princeton) has made a reputation for himself as something of a contrarian among US historians, whether by advocating for Hilary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 or arguing that Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Jackson still has merit. Wilentz continues on that path in No Property in Man, an important book that seeks to revise our understanding of how the framers of the US Constitution viewed slavery. Conventional wisdom today is that, at best, the framers of the Constitution used circumlocutions for slaves like "persons held to service or labor," because they were embarrassed by the existence of slavery, even as they refused to confront it; at worst, that the Constitution was intended to be a bulwark of slavery, especially the 3/5 clause and its provisions on fugitive slaves. Wilentz argues that, in fact, the framers included many critics of slavery, including James Madison, who followed a consistent course in recognizing slaves as persons and refusing to give national sanction to the institution of slavery in the Constitution. This will be a controversial work, but this reviewer finds Wilentz's case compelling. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Thomas D. Hamm, Earlham College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
ACROSS FROM THE New York Stock Exchange sits Federal Hall, the beautiful Greek Revival columned structure, the birthplace of American government. The building is where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president. It housed the Supreme Court and the first Congress. Its address is 26 Wall Street. Two blocks east at 75 Wall Street stands a 42-story modern structure of marble, glass and steel. This condominium sits at the old water's edge of the Hudson River, atop the slave market where for half a century (1711-62) enslaved Africans were bought and sold like cattle and corn. They were traded as commodities in the enormous trans-Atlantic slave markets that linked four continents together for nearly four centuries. These parcels of flesh and bone were "not like merchandise," James Madison argued at the Federal Convention in 1787. But they were counted as assets, or property, that helped build and finance the infrastructure and the wealth of the richest nation in the world. It is impossible to comprehend American history without understanding slavery's role in every aspect of its early development. Eleven slaves built a wall to protect a fledgling Dutch colony in 1626. Within a century, those 11 grew to represent one in five residents of what is now Manhattan, the nation's first capital city and today's global financial capital. Ten of America's first 12 presidents were slaveholders, as were two of the nation's earliest chief justices. Slavery is at the heart of the nation's origin story. The core of our democratic institutions - from the presidency to the Congress to the courts - was shaped immeasurably by it. And yet it is one of the least understood and distorted subjects in American history. The hip-hop superstar Kanye West's bizarre remark this spring that slavery was "a choice" is just one of many examples. A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that a "bare majority" of social studies teachers said they are qualified to teach it. Educators also complained about unclear state content standards and inadequate curricular resources. The net result: High school students are virtually illiterate on the subject, and this has had severe consequences for our national life. Sometimes in plain view and often just beneath the surface, slavery rests uncomfortably in the middle of national debates about monuments, white nationalism, kneeling athletes, Donald Trump's election, policing, immigrant family separation, racial wealth disparities and so on. Its meaning and legacy are, in many ways, as fiercely contested today as was the case when the framers first debated how to make America great. Wading into one of these debates, Sean Wilentz, the esteemed Princeton historian and author of a new book, "No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding," provoked a storm of controversy three years ago when he wrote in this newspaper that it was a "myth" that the United States "was founded on racial slavery." He was responding to a statement made by Bernie Sanders, who said the country was "created, and I'm sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles." Wilentz described such thinking as one of "the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history." Wilentz's words, at the time, struck a discordant note to the ears of many. Not only were activists on the left pushing for greater recognition of America's racist past, but a spate of recent books had been published with new evidence of slavery's indispensable role in the development of capitalism. From the very beginning, slavery was not a "Southern pathology" but an essential part of a modernizing, global economy, wrote Sven Beckert, the Harvard historian and author of "Empire of Cotton: A Global History." "Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America's first 'big business.' " So what is the falsehood? What does Wilentz know that others have gotten so terribly wrong about the founding connection between slavery and racism? In his revealing and passionately argued book, he insists that because the framers did not sanction slavery as a matter of principle, the antislavery legacy of the Constitution has been "slighted" and "misconstrued" for over 200 years. "Although the framers agreed to compromises over slavery that blunted antislavery hopes and augmented the slaveholders' power," Wilentz writes, "they also deliberately excluded any validation of property in man." To put it simply, the Constitution, as ratified in 1788, was less racist and pro-slavery than many have thought. The nation's founding document contained a fundamental antislavery ideal built into it. Enslaved people were defined legally as "persons" and not property. The usual evidence for what the celebrated historian John Hope Franklin called the "sweeping constitutional recognition of slavery" consists of the three-fifths compromise (with the enslaved counted for political representation as three-fifths of free persons), the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade until 1808 and the so-called fugitive slave clause. None of these provisions contained the actual words "slave" or "slavery." Nowhere do these words exist in the Constitution, that is, until after the Civil War, with ratification of the 13 th and 14 th Amendments. Wilentz goes to great lengths and, at times, takes great pains to show how Northern antislavery delegates combined forces with some moderate Upper South delegates to ensure the United States "would not validate slavery in national law." All references to persons "bound to service" or "held to service" were the deliberate and intentional consequence of these hard-fought efforts. Still, to critics at the time and to posterity this all looked like a hypocritical charade and a cover-up. Even those New Englanders whose professed antislavery commitments were beyond reproach, Wilentz finds, charged that "the framers had sneakily covered up their concessions to slavery with confounding euphemisms." Within weeks of the Federal Convention, Benjamin Gale, a Connecticut millowner, accused the delegates of writing a "dark, intricate, artful, crafty and unintelligible" document, the worst he'd ever read or seen, he complained. "Why could they have not spoke out in plain terms - Negroes?" On the other hand, the inviolability of private property, then as now, meant that the most ardent pro-slavery delegates and supporters did not see subterfuge but surrender. They wanted explicit language to protect existing state slavery laws, enshrining their natural right to own human beings. Patrick Henry said he "smelt a rat" when he noted, as Wilentz explains, the "absence in the Constitution of any categorical guarantee to the slaveholders of their rights to property in man." The difference between these two constitutional interpretations would shape the most consequential political debates over territorial expansion, the limits of federal power and one of the most basic questions of American democracy, whether or not blacks had any rights whites were "bound to respect." In 1836, the wealthy slaveholding Virginian James Madison died. The most important architect of the nation, he made possible the publication of his notes, breaking the seal on the "convention's agreed-upon secrecy." They revealed that during a key debate over import duties on the slave trade, he had persuaded the framers not "to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men. The reason of duties did not hold, as slaves are not like merchandise, consumed. &c." With that posthumous revelation, Wilentz argues, "the framers left room for political efforts aimed at slavery's restriction, and eventually, its destruction, even under a Constitution that safeguarded slavery." At root, the nagging question remains: What manner of nation is this? By the 1840 s, Madison's secret was out, and yet slavery would continue to be a proxy for everyone's own American values, including Wilentz's. The United States, he writes, had by then become the "wealthiest and most powerful slave society in the world." And neither truth nor reconciliation saved the country from a war that was the greatest hell on earth. In the end, restoring the antislavery intent of the Constitution leaves a more perplexing question at the heart of American democracy. If it is now correct to say that America's leaders got something right about racism in the beginning, why have they repeatedly gotten so much wrong ever since? That's a history lesson still desperately needing to be taught.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Bancroft Prize-winning historian pieces together how the Constitution set the stage for Civil War.The Constitution, notes Wilentz (American History/Princeton Univ.; The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics, 2017), allowed slavery without authorizing it. The framers excluded any mention of "property in men," slavery's bedrock principle. That exclusion made slavery a creation of individual states, not a national institution. Since the framers conducted their business secretly, opposite sides could create contrary ipressions from the same phrasing, interpreting the language to suit their purpose. Seeing control as an invasion of property rights, Southern leaders fought against ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the assessment of import taxes, and national abolition. In South Carolina, Charles Pinkney fought for the rights of slaveholders. To overcome fear of a Northern majority, his answer was to have representation based on wealth. Failing that, he proposed a three-fifths rule, whereby slaves were counted as 3/5 of a man. What the Constitution finally passed was a 20-year ban on abolitiona period during which South Carolina and Georgia imported more African slaves than in any other like periodthe 3/5 clause, and the fugitive slave clause, protecting a master's right to reclaim escaped slaves. Those opposed to slavery argued that man's right to personal liberty should override any property law, and slavery robbed slaves of their right to property in their own persons. When it came to ratifying the Constitution, it wasn't slavery but rather the division of powers between the state and federal governments that caused many to pause. This astute study of the attempts to create a nation including all the Colonies shows how difficult a task they had. While many condemned slavery, they also knew it could only be abolished gradually. Almost by necessity, Wilentz's account is occasionally repetitive in order to show how nuanced each argument became as compromises were reached.The narrative may be difficult going for general readers, but it's undeniably enlightening and well worth the effort. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
