Reading about antislavery constitutionalism literally changed my life. Lysander Spooner’s 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which I discovered in the 1990s, exposed me to a version of “originalism” that would really work. This was also a version of originalism that was not just for political conservatives. This led me from being primarily a contract law professor to a constitutional originalist who would argue in the Supreme Court, develop the theory of originalism, and work to achieve an originalist majority of Supreme Court justices. By reading these five books, you, too, can become an expert on antislavery constitutionalism and our forgotten constitutional past.
I wrote
A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist
In his book, Princeton historian Saul Wilentz completely alters our view of the American Founding. He tells the gripping story of how the antislavery forces at the Philadelphia convention, including crucially the Virginians, resisted the effort by some delegates from the Deep South to include an affirmative endorsement of human chattel slavery—the concept of property in man—in the text of the Constitution.
Such language would have contradicted the principles they’d adopted in the Declaration of Independence. Their success would later provide “constitutional abolitionists” like Salmon Chase and Frederick Douglass with crucial ammunition to advance their antislavery political program.
"Wilentz brings a lifetime of learning and a mastery of political history to this brilliant book." -David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. In this essential reconsideration of the creation and legacy of our nation's founding document, Sean Wilentz reveals the tortured compromises that led the Founders to abide slavery without legitimizing it, a deliberate ambiguity that fractured the nation seventy years later. Contesting the Southern proslavery version of…
The existence of antislavery constitutionalism has long been neglected by law professors and historians and is unknown to the public. I myself did not become aware of it until I had been a law professor for nearly 20 years! Wiecek’s is one of the earliest books to mark the origin and development of this movement.
Reading it had a huge impact on my thinking. It led me to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship to research the constitutional abolitionists' writings and how their ideas influenced the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted in 1868, to achieve political equality.
This ambitious book examines the constitutional and legal doctrines of the antislavery movement from the eve of the American Revolution to the Wilmot Proviso and the 1848 national elections. Relating political activity to constitutional thought, William M. Wiecek surveys the antislavery societies, the ideas of their individual members, and the actions of those opposed to slavery and its expansion into the territories. He shows that the idea of constitutionalism has popular origins and was not the exclusive creation of a caste of lawyers. In offering a sophisticated examination of both sides of the argument about slavery, he not only discusses…
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
Sewell’s book is the key to understanding how the ideas discussed in Wilentz’s and Wiecek’s books got translated into political action. In particular, he describes the establishment of the antislavery Liberty Party, which begat the less extreme Free Soil party that opposed any expansion of slavery into the territories from which new states would be formed, culminating in the antislavery Republican Party.
It was the 1860 political platform of the Republican party that led Southern states to secede from the Union even before its candidate Abraham Lincoln and its majorities in Congress could take office and enact its antislavery programs within the constraints of the U.S. Constitution.
At first a voice in the wilderness, then the rallying cry of a new morality, abolitionism became the springboard to power of a major national party. Ballots for Freedom recapitulates the political war against slavery, from the first debates over the creation of an abolitionist third party to the election of Abraham Lincoln on an essentially antislavery Republican platform.
This book opened my eyes to the effectiveness and consistency of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1860 in advancing their antislavery agenda, for example, by immediately abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and requiring any new states to prohibit slavery in their Constitutions.
This book describes the earnestness with which these members of the Senate and House pursued their antislavery agenda over the vehement objections of the Democrats from states that had remained in the Union. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the defects in the original Constitution that had permitted slavery within any of the original 13 states that had retained it. So, they amended the Constitution not once but three times to put an end to slavery and establish political equality in the United States.
Freedom National is a groundbreaking history of emancipation that joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South. It shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery. These two aims-"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable"-were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war.
By summer 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and…
An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. A culinary guide and book of ready reference meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, and it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.
The one political figure who tied all these developments together was Salmon P. Chase. The more I learned about Chase in my own research, the more of a personal hero of mine he became. And yet, he has been completely forgotten. With Stahr’s book, Chase finally has the biography he deserves.
Chase began his career representing fugitive slaves in court, earning him the nickname “The Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves.” When his legal challenges were rebuffed, he helped found and wrote the political platforms of the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties. As a Free Soiler he became a U.S. Senator from Ohio, as a Republican, he became the governor of Ohio, Lincoln’s the Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the United States.
His personal story weaves together all the elements described in the previous books.
From an acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer, an “eloquently written, impeccably researched, and intensely moving” (The Wall Street Journal) reassessment of Abraham Lincoln’s indispensable Secretary of the Treasury: a leading proponent for black rights during his years in cabinet and later as Chief Justice of the United States.
Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous…
A law professor's memoir of his own ascendancy from prosecutor to influential legal thinker.
From prosecuting murderers in Chicago, to arguing before the Supreme Court, to authoring more than a dozen books, Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett has played an integral role in the rise of originalism—the movement to identify, restore, and defend the original meaning of the Constitution. Thanks in part to his efforts, by 2018 a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices self-identified as “originalists.”
After writing seminal books on libertarianism and contract law, Barnett pivoted to constitutional law. His mission to restore "the lost Constitution" took him from the schoolhouse to the courthouse, where he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzeles v. Raich in the Supreme Court—a case now taught to every law student. Later, he devised and spearheaded the constitutional challenge to Obamacare.
All this earned him major profiles in such publications as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. Now he recounts his compelling journey from a working-class kid in Calumet City, Illinois to “Washington Power Breaker,” as the Congressional Quarterly Weekly called him.
The engaging story of his rise from obscurity to one of the most influential thinkers in America is an inspiring how-to guide for anyone seeking real-world advancement of justice and liberty for all.
In 2038 a devastating pandemic sweeps across the world. Two decades later, Britain remains the epicenter for the Fornax variant, annexed by a terrified global community.
David Malik is as careful as any man to avoid contact with the virus. But when his sister tests positive as an asymptomatic carrier,…
Who was the man who would become Caesar's lieutenant, Brutus' rival, Cleopatra's lover, and Octavian's enemy?
When his stepfather is executed for his involvement in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Mark Antony and his family are disgraced. His adolescence is marked by scandal and mischief, his love affairs are fleeting, and yet,…
