Slavery and the Commerce Power

David L. Lightner has spent almost two decades researching and writing about the domestic slave trade. His new book extends the scope of his previous scholarship by arguing that “southern anxiety over the threat to the interstate slave trade was an important element in precipitating the secession crisis and Civil War” (p. xi). That essential premise is correct even if the book's subtitle promises more than it can deliver. A brief summary of the domestic slave trade familiarizes readers with the general contours of human commerce in the antebellum South. The book then leaps back to the Constitutional Convention, but because there was only a small interstate slave trade at that time, the issue did not figure prominently in the Philadelphia debates. Congress and the Supreme Court subsequently applied the interstate commerce clause and the potential ban on African imports to the domestic slave trade, but failed to set clear policies. As with cultural issues in today's politics, low-level scuffles over the interstate slave trade were a means to consolidate political support without taking meaningful policy action. The constant agitation, however, made southern whites more defensive about the peculiar institution. When radical abolitionists got involved in politics, they presented a serious threat to the interstate slave trade by arguing that the commerce clause could be used to suppress the domestic slave trade. As Henry B. Stanton bluntly put it, the interstate slave trade was the “jugular vein” of slavery (p. 102). Destroy it, and slavery will bleed to death

Economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Race, History, and American Society