Sean Wilentz. No Property in Man

Seldom has an author so fully, accurately, yet succinctly managed to state the thesis in the title of a book as Sean Wilentz has in No Property in Man. The subtitle elaborates: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. By these title choices, Wilentz foregrounds the constitutional and political struggles over slavery for the antebellum era, a period he covered magisterially in The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), a winner of the Bancroft Prize. In his latest book, he challenges what he considers a dangerously misleading canard: that the Constitution was a proslavery compact. Following the pioneering work of Dwight L. Dumond and Howard Jay Graham, historians in the 1960s began to treat abolitionist constitutional thought respectfully, recognizing antislavery arguments as the progenitor of constitutional ideas that came to fruition in Reconstruction. One subset of these antislavery constitutional historians, whom Wilentz labels “neo-Garrisonians,” affirmed the views of William Lloyd Garrison’s coadjutor Wendell Phillips—another author whose title perfectly captured the thesis of his book: The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact (1844). Phillips’s contention that the Constitution secured slavery was echoed in Garrison’s 1854 claim that it was “a covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell” (quoted on 12). Modern historians who have endorsed Phillips’s thesis or some part of it include Paul Finkelman (who identified no fewer than fifteen clauses of the Constitution that directly or indirectly protected slavery), Staughton Lynd, George William Van Cleve, David Waldstreicher, James Oakes, and this reviewer, among others. Though their views were persuasively contested by Don Fehrenbacher, Earl Maltz, and William W. Freehling, the idea of a proslavery Constitution has proved tenacious. Nevertheless, a “basic disagreement remains,” Wilentz believes, “over the extent to which the Constitution actually acknowledged slavery and affirmed slavery’s legality” (276 n. 21). He attempts to settle that dispute decisively and refute the neo-Garrisonian thesis.

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