The Crooked Path to Abolition

September 28, 2020
Historian Oakes (The Scorpion’s Sting) offers a crisp and well-argued examination of the politics and constitutional theories behind President Lincoln’s stance on slavery. He contends that abolitionists’ reading of the Constitution as an antislavery document led to the creation in the 1820s and ’30s of the “Antislavery Project,” “a series of specific policies... designed to stop and then reverse the expansion of slavery” that Lincoln and the Republican Party adopted in the 1850s. Meanwhile, proslavery advocates pointed to the fugitive slave and three-fifths clauses in the Constitution and argued that the founding fathers intended to extend rights to white men only. Oakes details Lincoln’s belief that the key to gaining widespread support for ending slavery was cutting off its expansion into new territories, and persuasively argues that though Lincoln defended Black citizenship after the Supreme Court denied it in the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, he failed to think deeply about racial discrimination. After signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln focused his energies on the passage of the 13th Amendment to establish a constitutional prohibition against slavery. This intelligent and deeply researched study adds much to the scholarly debate about how and why slavery was abolished.

November 1, 2020
Leading Civil War historian Oakes argues that Abraham Lincoln's political commitment to abolitionism was closely linked to his interpretation of the Constitution. It's not news that the war allowed the sixteenth president to accelerate his plans for the gradual elimination of slavery. But it hasn't been easy to harmonize his earlier, more conservative approach with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. Oakes finds the solution in Lincoln's belief that the Constitution, despite containing some apparently proslavery clauses as a political concession, remains fundamentally hostile to the concept that people can be property. Broadly endorsed by abolitionists, "antislavery constitutionalism" was both a philosophy of federal restraint and legal justification for limitations on slavery outside the borders of slave states, with the expectation that this would cause slave states to collapse. Oakes explored some of this before in The Scorpion's Sting (2014) and Freedom National (2012). But his focus on Lincoln's antislavery constitutionalism is new, and Oakes' conclusions about Lincoln have evolved accordingly. The result is a timely consideration of the interrelation of law and politics and a valuable contribution to Lincoln studies.

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Starred review from December 1, 2020

Radical abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, decried the U.S. Constitution as a, "pact with the devil," for its support of slavery. But the Constitution does not clearly address the issue of slavery. Award-winning Civil War historian Oakes (Graduate Center, CUNY; The Scorpion's Sting) shows how the Constitutional compromises forged by the Founding Fathers led to much ambiguity and dissension. Beginning in the 1820s, an "Antislavery Project" arose with the goal of stopping and then reversing slavery's expansion. Abolitionists rightfully pointed out that the text embodied the principle of human equality, referred to persons and not slaves, and never referred to a right to human property. Oakes proceeds to argue that Abraham Lincoln's understanding of the Constitution, rather than racism, explains Lincoln's sometimes slow and cautious movement on abolitionism. Once the war began, the movement of enslaved people to Union lines and decisions made by Union commanders in the field drove the push toward emancipation and abolition. Oakes's well researched narrative offers a vivid and insightful contribution to the literature on the abolition of slavery and Lincoln's role. VERDICT This book will appeal to readers interested in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and constitutional history.--Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

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Starred review from October 15, 2020
A superb analysis of how the Constitution influenced the battle over slavery. Although the Constitution is widely considered a sacred document, legal scholars disagree on what the various clauses mean, and activists denounce it as flawed by shameful racist compromises. Oakes agrees that the Founding Fathers did indeed compromise. However, he demonstrates that the end result was so sloppy that, before the Civil War, slavery supporters could claim that it protected their institution, and abolitionists had no doubt that it didn't. For example, the Fifth Amendment states that no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process. The Constitution refers to slaves as "persons," but only abolitionists believed it. "Nowhere," writes the author, "does the Constitution state that Congress cannot 'interfere' with slavery or abolition in a state, yet it was widely agreed that it could not." The Constitution never mentions a right of "property in man" despite the assertion by Chief Justice Robert Taney in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that it does. Thus, the heated debate over slavery referred to principles absent from the text. Depending on one's view, there existed a pro-slavery Constitution and an anti-slavery Constitution. Despite a lifelong dislike of slavery, Lincoln gets low marks from activists for his statements on racial equality, but he was a practical politician who needed to appeal to a Republican Party that contained members who were "thoroughgoing racial egalitarians." "Others were unabashed racists in a way that Lincoln never was," writes Oakes, who parses a complex topic with an impressive combination of deep insight and concision. Pressured during the famous 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, who claimed that Lincoln was "an advocate for racial 'amalgamation, ' " he backpedaled. Other scholars fault him for keeping abolitionists at arm's length and look down their noses at the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed few slaves. However, Oakes persuasively shows how, from the moment Lincoln assumed office, he made it clear by both rhetoric and action that slavery was doomed. Many books discuss Lincoln and abolition, but this is among the best.

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