1. Lutz, Donald S. has offered the clearest articulation of this logic in “Toward a Theory of Constitutional Amendment,” in Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment, ed. Levinson, Sanford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 237–74Google Scholar. A logic that Lutz presents as a hypothesis, others employ as assumption. On the informal constitutional construction by the political branches, considerBesso, Michael, “Constitutional Amendment Procedures and the Informal Political Construction of Constitutions,” The Journal of Politics 67 (2005): 84Google Scholar. On the logic of the courts, consider Strauss, David A., “The Irrelevance of Constitutional Amendments,” Harvard Law Review 114 (2001): 1461Google Scholar. A comment such as Strauss's is particularly relevant to this essay. In the course of arguing that amendments are “irrelevant,” it notes that the mere possibility of amendment creates limits on how loosely the supreme interpreters of the Constitution are willing to apply the text.

2. Mark Noll has analyzed both the textual hermeneutic and providentialism of this story in a series of recent works:“The Bible and Slavery,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Miller, Randall M., Stout, Harry S., and Wilson, Charles Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–73Google Scholar; America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 386–438Google Scholar; and The Civil War as Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar. For additional discussions of the biblical debates over slavery, seeHarrill, J. Albert, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000): 149–86Google Scholar; Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 494–504Google Scholar. For a treatment of the prominent place of providentialism during the war, seeParish, Peter J., “The Instruments of Providence: Slavery, Civil War and the American Churches,” in The Church and War, ed. Sheils, W. J., Studies in Church History, 20 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983), 291–320Google Scholar. Though he places his explanatory emphasis on anti-southern animus rather than the religious reasoning discussed here, no one has provided a better general treatment of the abrupt wartime shift of the northern churches on the matter of slavery thanMcKivigan, John R., The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. For a superb analysis of one denomination's engagement with these matters, seeJones, Donald G., The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism: A Study in Piety, Political Ethics and Civil Religion (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1979), esp. chap. 4, “Providence and Historical Interpretation,” 58-107Google Scholar.

3. Pelikan, Jaroslav, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Grey, Thomas C., “The Constitution as Scripture,” Stanford Law Review 37 (1984): 1–25Google Scholar; Levinson, Sanford, Constitutional Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9–53 and passimGoogle Scholar. For a more general observation, typical of historians, seeAppleby, Joyce, “The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited,” Journal of American History 74 (December 1987): 809Google Scholar.

4. Morgan, Edmund S., Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988).Google Scholar

5. Consider the evidence from no less stable a pillar of American religious culture than the Presbyterian General Assembly, which considered the matter in a lengthy discussion containing such observations as, “any or all [commandments] may be set aside by him in whose hands are all his creatures.”“The General Assembly of 1842,” The Princeton Review 14 (July 1842): 517 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moajrnl;idno=acf4325.1-14.003 (12 Nov. 2007). For a splendid encapsulation of this mentality, albeit from an earlier period, seeGoogle ScholarHall, David D., “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” in Saints and Revolutionaries, ed. Hall, David D., Murrin, John M., and Tate, Thad W. (New York: Norton, 1984), 85Google Scholar.

6. On American biblicism, seeHatch, Nathan O., “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” in The Bible in America, ed. Noll, Mark A. and Hatch, Nathan O. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–78Google Scholar. On the matter of providence in early American life there have been a number of very valuable works, includingBerens, John F., Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640-1815 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978) andGoogle ScholarGuyatt, Nicholas, “‘The Peculiar Smiles of Heaven’: Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1865” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003) http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=765020781&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=PQD (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar.

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9. Ackerman, Bruce, We the People, vol. 2, Transformations (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 1998).Google Scholar

10. Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, quoted at 2; Noll, , America's God, 377Google Scholar.

11. Fuller, Richard and Wayland, Francis, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York, 1845), 13–125Google Scholar. For a contrasting view, compareWeld, Theodore Dwight, The Bible against Slavery (1837)Google Scholar.

12. A Tennessean, , The Bible Gives No Sanction to Slavery (n.d.), 10 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEU2037.0001.001 (12 November 2007)Google Scholar; Fuller, and Wayland, , Domestic Slavery, 51Google Scholar; Wisner, William C., “The Biblical Argument on Slavery,” The American Biblical Repository 11 (April 1844): 328–35 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=69993948&sid=2&Fmt=1&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP; [Stephen A. Hodgman],Google ScholarThe Nation's Sin and Punishment; or, The Hand of God Visible in the Overthrow of Slavery (New York, 1864), 31Google Scholar; Shanks, Caroline L., “The Biblical Anti-Slavery Argument of the Decade 1830-1840,” The Journal of Negro History 16 (April 1931), quoted at 139-40 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2992%28193104%2916%3A2%3C132%3ATBAAOT% 3E2.0.CO%3B2-S (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar.

13. While one might expect such arguments from the South, their prevalence in the North is quite striking. See, for instance,Hopkins, John Henry, A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical and Historical View of Slavery (New York: Pooley, 1864), 315 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT7253.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar; Stiles, Joseph C., Modern Reform Examined (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857), 20 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABJ1692.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar; Adams, Nehemiah, The Sable Cloud. A Southern Tale with Northern Comments (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 77-83, 107-8, 117, 136-140, 152–53, passim http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABA7995.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar. Adams's apologetic work of fiction explicitly conveys the same sentiment, that modern enslavement would require its own tokens of divine approval, and then goes on to convey the impression that God “evidently appointed” the South to its own providential project in regard to the slaves. For a southern example, seeThe Proslavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (Charleston: Walker, Richards, 1852), 16–17 http://www.hti. umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT7488.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar; for ways in which providence generally figured into the proslavery mindset, seeDaly, John Patrick, When Slavery Was Called Freedom (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 11, 15-20, 23, 25-26, 40, 63, 92, 99-100, 108-9, 123, 138Google Scholar.

14. VanderMolen, Ronald J., “Providence as Mystery, Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin's Doctrine of Providence,” Church History 47 (March 1978): 27–47Google Scholar; Winship's, Michael P.Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11-15, 20–27Google Scholar.

15. See, for instance, Wisner, , “The Biblical Argument on Slavery,” 336–37Google Scholarand The Debates of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Maryland (Annapolis: Richard P. Bayly, 1864), 630 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AEW7572.0001.001 (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar. See also, Iota, , “Habit vs. Right,” Christian Union, June 25, 1870Google Scholar, 406 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=704920012&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007), in which the church's changing views on slavery and alcohol are compared. Perhaps most poignantly, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., used this verse to understand the slaveholding of his own pious progenitors. See Minkema, Kenneth P. and Stout, Harry S., “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740-1865”, The Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 57–58Google Scholar. Tellingly, where the elder Edwards had used this verse to explain the New Testament's relation to the Old, his son invoked it to explain contemporary changes within the American church.

16. Strickland, W. P, “Loyalty to Government,” Christian Advocate and Journal, 15 January 1863, 18 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=852468002&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar. For a similar argument, see“Discussion of Slavery in Congress,” Christian Inquirer, 8 January 1848, 50 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=846942052&sid=4&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007)Google Scholar. This practice of seeing constitutional parallels in the Bible had a long history in the United States. See “K” [Benjamin Franklin] to the Editor, in The Federal Gazzette, April 8, 1788, printed inBailyn, Bernard, ed., The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification (New York: Library of America, 1993), 2:404Google Scholar.

17. Kyvig, David E., Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 128–31Google Scholar; Banning, Lance, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 328–31Google Scholar. In terms of the self-reinforcing relationship proposed here, it is worth noting that Jefferson was both more eager to appeal to the People on constitutional matters and more committed to a strict construction of the text. That Jefferson and Madison seemed to downplay these principles when their political interests were at stake-most notably in the case of the Louisiana Purchase-confirms the notion that interpretive principles can be invoked and abandoned in purely instrumental ways, which is one of the reasons why most constitutional theory sits only imperfectly on the actually messiness of history. However, that does not mean that such theory has no historical impact. On this point one might consider the reflections ofRakove, Jack N. in “The Super-Legality of the Constitution, or, a Federalist Critique of Bruce Ackerman's Neo-Federalism,” The Yale Law Journal 108 (June 1999): 1931–32Google Scholar.

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23. “Shall We Vote to Perpetuate Slavery?” New Englander 2 (October 1844): 594 http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=454635022&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=17675&RQT=309&VName=HNP (12 Nov. 2007).Google Scholar

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