No Property in Man, Sean Wilentz
No Property in Man, Sean Wilentz
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No Property in Man
Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding

Author: Sean Wilentz

Narrator: L.J. Ganser

Unabridged: 10 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/02/2018


Synopsis

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation.

Wilentz's controversial and timely reconsideration upends orthodox views of the Constitution. He describes the document as a tortured paradox that abided slavery without legitimizing it. This paradox lay behind the great political battles that fractured the nation over the next seventy years. As Southern Fire-eaters invented a proslavery version of the Constitution, antislavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, proclaimed antislavery versions based on the framers' refusal to validate what they called "property in man."

About Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on American history and politics, including The Rise of American Democracy, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Politicians and the Egalitarians, chosen as Best History Book of the Year by Kirkus and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Wilentz's writings on American music have earned him two Grammy nominations and two Deems-Taylor-ASCAP awards.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph

Really enjoyed this examination of the place of slavery in the Constitution and early U.S. history. Wilentz wades into a contentious historical debate with subtlety and expertise as one of the leading scholars on the early American Republic. The core argument involved the following tension: On one h......more

Goodreads review by Paul

For the amateur historian, an important resource in understanding the thesis that the Constitution did not endorse enslavement but contained enough wiggle room, in spite of its acceptance of the reality of slavery, to put into motion the culmination of efforts to eradicate slavery in American life.......more

Goodreads review by Brad

James Madison may not have been a stalwart antislavery champion when he told the Federal convention that it would be wrong to admit into the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man. "Of course it was wrong," Charles Sumner (later) exclaimed to the Senate. "It was criminal and unpar......more