The relationship between the struggle against slavery and the Constitution remains a fraught historical subject. The Constitution was written by political elites who were fiercely divided over the question of slavery, and the legal groundwork for slavery it provided in the antebellum era remained ambiguous. As a text, the Constitution undeniably enabled a proslavery interpretation of federal law, but the debate about the role of constitutionalism in enabling or undermining slavery as political conflict over slavery's legitimacy escalated has remained contentious.
In The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, James Oakes accounts for the complexities and contradictions of constitutional thought, but nevertheless cuts through this debate with impressive clarity. He frames constitutionalism as a set of competing political traditions that took form through activism and fierce political struggle. In Oakes's view, antislavery constitutionalism constituted the foundations of the ideology underlying political battles against slavery, and...