The United States was established on a compromise that proved unworkable. Although the word “slavery” never appeared in the U.S. Constitution, the issue was one of the problems facing its authors. Delegates at the constitutional convention from Northern states, where slavery had never taken deep root and was being phased out, were less comfortable with the institution’s preservation than delegates from the South, where slavery remained a pillar of the economy and the social order.
In The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, Andrew Delbanco terms American unity a “political fiction” in the republic’s early decades. He exaggerates but only a little as he focuses on the increasing tension as slavery became an ongoing test case for interstate relations and federal authority. The mechanics of binding slave with free states was set in motion in Article 4 of the Constitution, calling for the return of any “Person held in service or Labour in one State” i.e. the obligation of free states to send escaped slaves back to their owners. The enforcement of that clause, always a source of friction, turned into a flashpoint with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which strengthened penalties for aiding and abetting runaways. Along with competition by settlers to bring western territories into the Union as slave or free states, the 1850 legislation set the nation on the course toward Civil War.
The War Before the War is a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of American history and the human condition. A professor of American studies at Columbia University, Delbanco writes reflectively on the contradictions embedded in the birth of the nation and in its founders. He reproduces a 1769 notice signed by Thomas Jefferson—essentially a personal ad seeking information on a runaway “Mulatto slave called Sandy.” He remained a slave owner after penning his memorable thesis in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” As for the Constitution’s primary author, James Madison, he was observed holding forth “on the evils of slavery while being waited on by his slaves.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Delbanco isn’t satisfied with enjoying the irony but searches for context. The “founders were born into a world in which slavery was widely regarded as a universal feature of human society,” he writes. In early America, large numbers of people were indentured servants held in what often amounted to a term of slavery. Moreover, most early Americans—and Delbanco lists convicts, beggars, children and women—“lived at the mercy of those wielding power over them.”
Although the Northern states became committed to banning slavery, support for abolition didn’t necessarily translate into racial harmony. Some Northern states prohibited settlement by free blacks or limited their civil rights. Delbanco explains: “Black Americans were thus caught between one region that wished to keep them as slave laborers and another that did not want them at all.”
The South’s fear that slavery would be abolished led to secession and Civil War, a conflict most commentators on both sides thought would end within weeks in a new set of compromises. Instead, the war continued for four years. On the Union side, abolition was not always the motivating factor. Early on, Congress passed resolutions denying any intention to interfere “with the rights of established institutions” in the rebellious states. Preserving the Union was the overriding objective, yet abolitionists saw the war as their opportunity and with reluctance, the U.S. Army finally admitted black volunteers. During the war, slaves were freed by federal forces as a matter of military necessity, preventing their use by Confederates to build military emplacements. They were put to work for the Union but their condition “was not often materially different from what it had been under slavery.”
In the end, slavery was abolished but the problem of racial disparity and animosity has not been resolved. Delbanco warns against easy readings of history. Emancipation was not the inevitable result of the Civil War; the decisive Union victory at Gettysburg might have been a fluke; Lincoln might have been forced to compromise once again.
