Currently reading James Oakes's wonderful CROOKED PATH TO ABOLITION. The argument over whether the Constitution was a pro-slavery or anti-slavery document was more intense and important than I'd realized. That is, was property in human beings embedded in the Constitution? 1/
One powerful argument Oakes makes is that when six seceded states met to create a Confederate constitution, they kept almost all of the US Constitution intact; 2/
"the one conspicuous change, however, was that the Confederate Constitution explicitly referred to slaves as 'property' and protected slave property as a constitutional right." 3/
One must then ask, if the US Constitution was a pro-slavery document, why the need for the change? The importance of this issue in the election of Lincoln (and thus, the war) is far greater than I'd thought. Great book. 4/4
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