A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic

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Description

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North The us, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.  But an increasing number of right through the contested politics of the early republic, abolitionists cried out that the Constitution itself was a slaveowners’ document, produced to give protection to and further their rights. A Slaveholders’ Union furthers this unsettling claim by demonstrating once and for all that slavery was indeed an essential a part of the foundation of the nascent republic.

In this powerful book, George William Van Cleve demonstrates that the Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. He convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than mere “political” compromises—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would have the ability to expanding into a continental empire. In order for The us to change into an empire on this kind of scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor, and the price of their allegiance was the deliberate long-term protection of slavery by The us’s leaders through the nation’s early expansion. Reconsidering the role played by the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, Van Cleve also shows that abolition there was much less progressive in its origins—and had much less influence on slavery’s expansion—than up to now thought.

Deftly interweaving historical and political analyses, A Slaveholders’ Union will likely change into the definitive explanation of slavery’s persistence and growth—and of its influence on American constitutional development—from the Revolutionary War through the Missouri Compromise of 1821.

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