The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
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Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize
An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies.
The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States.
Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action—in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade—they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonization of free Blacks abroad.
President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King’s cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.
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Historian Oakes (The Scorpion's Sting) offers a crisp and well-argued examination of the politics and constitutional theories behind President Lincoln's stance on slavery. He contends that abolitionists' reading of the Constitution as an antislavery document led to the creation in the 1820s and '30s of the "Antislavery Project," "a series of specific policies... designed to stop and then reverse the expansion of slavery" that Lincoln and the Republican Party adopted in the 1850s. Meanwhile, proslavery advocates pointed to the fugitive slave and three-fifths clauses in the Constitution and argued that the founding fathers intended to extend rights to white men only. Oakes details Lincoln's belief that the key to gaining widespread support for ending slavery was cutting off its expansion into new territories, and persuasively argues that though Lincoln defended Black citizenship after the Supreme Court denied it in the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, he failed to think deeply about racial discrimination. After signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln focused his energies on the passage of the 13th Amendment to establish a constitutional prohibition against slavery. This intelligent and deeply researched study adds much to the scholarly debate about how and why slavery was abolished.
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