Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (paperback edition, 2018)

Excellent. In this book, Wilentz explores the "paradox" contained in the Constitution's treatment of slavery. Namely, while some of the founding document's elements (3/5th clause, 20-year delay in the possibility of banning the importation of more slaves, fugitive slave clause) strengthened slavery and slave states, the fact that the Constitution gave no explicit sanction to slavery in national law (as opposed to state law), indeed did not even use the terms slave or slavery, would prove to be an important potential support for the antislavery movement from 1788 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In other words, the Constitution tolerated slavery, but did not explicitly endorse it. And this proved to be important in the run-up to the Civil War. Wilentz tracks the legal and political wrangling in extremely close detail. I was frequently reminded of Max Weber's comment that politics is the "slow drilling of hard boards." (Another book that had this effect on me, though on a very different topic, was John Judis's excellent Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.) The book explores the range of views on both the anti- and proslavery sides. I didn't realize that William Lloyd Garrison was an outlier among the abolitionists in viewing the Constitution as a "pact with evil." I think it would be salutary if high school and college students could be exposed both to the numerous shades of opinion (rather than just the racist/anti-racist dichotomy) and to the work of politics and negotiation (of course, in this case, negotiation ultimately broke down). The latter (familiarizing young Americans with the sausage making of politics) might be helpful in improving our civic education, which, as far as I can tell, is in a woeful state. Wilentz rightly acknowledges that the abolitionist movement, which started in northern states (but reached as far south as Virginia) in the 1780s, was the first anti-slavery political movement in world history. I frequently found myself asking how the New York Times could publish its 1619 Project, which so flies in the face of excellent scholarship like this book.