The Constitution and Slavery: A Special Relationship

In their efforts to understand how antebellum American abolitionists interpreted the relationship between slavery and the United States Constitution, scholars have underestimated abolitionists' concern with the question ‘Is the Constitution a pro-slavery document?’ Drawing on abolitionist newspapers, periodicals and correspondence, this article shows that the anti-slavery constitutional theories of the 1830s did not presume slavery to be unconstitutional, nor did they assume that the Constitution was pro-slavery, and therefore irrelevant to the abolitionist cause. These constitutional interpretive subtleties laid the foundations for the more prominent and radical theories that came in the following decade from the pens of Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner.