Review of The War Before the War by Andrew Delbanco review by David Blight.
We have never stopped arguing about whether the Constitution was fundamentally proslavery---in effectively sustaining the system---or whether it contained antislavery elements that were revealed over time. What we do know is that eventually a strong segment of political abolitionists forged an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution that energized the original Republican Party and helped foment disunion.
"Humanity cries out against this vast enormity, but not one man knows a prudent remedy." Herman Melville
For fugitives like Douglass, the nation's devotion to prudence and the law became irrelevant.
As Delbanco puts it, "before the fugitive slave law, northerners could pretend that slavery had nothing to do with them. After the fugitive slave law, there was no evading their complicity."
Because slave owners considered them a besieged minority vulnerable to the expansion of federal power, there was in allowing the federal government to assume control over the slave property.
America's institutions could not contain a conflict between two discount visions of the future.
Defense of the Tenth Amendment states rights was a front for proslavery ideology.
The US in the pre civil war 19th could be seen as 24 little sovereign nations.
Stowe said that slavery could only die in violence.
Calhoun as Ahab a la Melville.
The Age of Trump is not as bad as the 1850's, or is it?
How could people in the past not see what is so clear and evident to us in the present?
Slavery was a factory for manufacturing monsters.
The fugitive slave question made a united country impossible. History is not inevitable. It could always go differently. History seeks no goal. Beware of certainties. The 19th Century ended up a battle between armies. One of them won on the battlefield but did not necessarily win the political war. Self-tortured by slaver, the US slipped into disunion. Still disunited today.
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