The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery

About this book

William Lloyd Garrison argued--and many leading historians have since agreed--that the Constitution of the United States was a proslavery document. Garrison called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." But in The Slaveholding Republic one of Americas most eminent historians Don E. Fehrenbacher argues against this claim in a wide-ranging landmark history that stretches from the Continental Congress to the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Fehrenbacher ranges from sharp-eyed analyses of the deal-making behind the "proslavery clauses" of the constitution to colorful accounts of partisan debates in Congress and heated confrontations with Great Britain (for instance over slaves taken off American ships and freed in British ports). He shows us that the Constitution itself was more or less neutral on the issue of slavery and that in the antebellum period the idea that the Constitution protected slavery was hotly debated (many Northerners would concede only that slavery was protected by state law not by federal law). Nevertheless he also reveals that US policy--whether in foreign courts on the high seas in federal territories or even in the District of Columbia--was consistently proslavery. The book concludes with a brilliant portrait of Lincoln. Fehrenbacher makes clear why Lincolns election was such a shock to the South and shows how Lincolns approach to emancipation which seems exceedingly cautious by modern standards quickly evolved into a "Republican revolution" that ended the anomaly of the United States as a "slaveholding republic." The last and perhaps most important book by a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian The Slaveholding Republic illuminates one of the most enduring issues in our nations history.