The introduction outlines the book’s argument that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery introduced a sense of historical distance from the founding era and the biblical past. It also defines key terms, including historical distance, sacred texts, and favored pasts, and outlines developments by which the Bible maintained its status as a sacred text, while the Constitution achieved a similar kind of status in antebellum America. These developments set the stage for the process by which debates over slavery began to historicize the biblical and constitutional pasts. This process corresponded with the broader emergence of a modern historical consciousness. And yet, the nature of American religious and legal culture, and the presence of slavery, gave unique shape to American historical awareness. The book makes its most innovative move in showing how slavery encouraged interpretive shifts to read both the Bible and the Constitution as historical texts. I focus on a range of thinkers and interpreters and read their writings with an eye toward measuring historical consciouness. This approach demonstrates that the crisis over slavery in America became a crisis of historicity.

This chapter outlines antislavery readings of the Bible during the 1830s and 1840s, highlighting their implications for historical awareness. It shows how words such as context, circumstance, and accommodation seeped into the readings of figures who demonstrated little interest in or awareness of biblical criticism and suggests that even interpretations that did not privilege historical explication sometimes challenged the assumption of a close correspondence between biblical and modern times. The historicizing process began with the most distant periods in question, the Old Testament eras, before encroaching on the period of the New Testament. As debate rested on the New Testament, a number of antislavery readers argued that Christ and his apostles had planted the seeds of slavery’s abolition, a reading that further highlighted historical distance. The argument that the universal principles would find fulfillment in the future drew attention to the distance between the biblical past and the American present. This contention, which retained faith in sacred texts, held great potential to spread awareness of that distance.

The prologue spotlights twenty-first-century uses of both the founding era and the biblical past to introduce the book’s central contention that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery cultivated a sense of historical distance in antebellum America. The prologue points to examples of how contemporary Americans both ignore and highlight historical distance in making political use of the founding era and the biblical past. It suggests that in both the antebellum era and in the twenty-first century, politics has shaped American approaches to these pasts and their corrsponding texts – the Bible and the Constitution. At the same time, the prologue maintains that the idea of the past as distant, which has become a common assumption in our period, only began to emerge in the antebellum era. To highlight the continuities and differences between antebellum and twenty-first century thought, the prologue references phrases such as “black lives matter” and “make America great again,” even as it points towards its central focus on the antebellum developments that shed light on the meanings of such phrases.

The Dred Scott decision embodied how the debates over slavery held unique potential to deepen Americans’ awareness of historical distance. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney accepted the historical grounds of debate that had been prepared through decades of interpretive emphasis on the historical explication. He then argued that because the founders had not considered blacks as citizens in 1787, blacks could not be citizens in 1857. In this reading, Taney forcefully rejected the antislavery idea that the progress of moral insight demanded new constitutional readings. However, in their dissenting opinions, John McLean and Benjamin Curtis gave official credence to much of that antislavery idea. They suggested that the Constitution could be adapted in light of original expectations of abolition. These opinions, along with political and popular responses to the decision, accelerated a growing sense that more than just chronological difference separated nineteenth-century Americans from their revolutionary predecessors. In their appeals to the founding era, the justices and their respondents highlighted unmistakable historical differences between that past and their present.

This chapter narrates African American historian William C. Nell’s efforts to highlight the actions of black Revolutionaries. His focus on figures such as Crispus Attucks, rather than static texts, such as the Constitution, laid claim to the first American Revolution in a way that signaled the need for a second revolution. While emphasizing instances of black assertiveness, Nell also narrated the instantiation of white prejudice. This indicated the promise of contingent change: if the human actions of the post-revolutionary period had betrayed the human actions of the revolutionary era, then new revolutionaries could reconstruct the current proslavery and prejudicial context and grant black contemporaries the rights for which their forebears fought. This interpretive frame inspired black reponses to Dred Scott, including the creation of Crispus Attucks Day. The Attucks commemorators crafted historical arguments to confront the racial prejudice they identified in both Roger B. Taney’s decision and in fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker’s speeches, and they looked to the first American Revolution to envision a second revolution in which blacks would play starring roles.

The epilogue indicates continuities and changes in American historical thought, highlighting the persistence of the ways in which politics inform historical awareness, and also showing that Americans continue to read the Constitution and the Bible in spite of – or in light of – historical awareness. While drawing attention to these continuities, the epilogue emphasizes differences in thought as well, particularly the fact that Americans today are more likely than their antebellum predecessors to engage in or to be confronted by conversations revolving around ahistorical and historical thinking. Twenty-first-century historical consciousness can be seen in aspirationalist readings of the Constitution and approaches to the Bible that deliberately account for historical distance. In attending to both continuities and changes, the epilogue underscores Americans’ continued efforts to bridge the meaning of founding documents to our new times, while also emphasizing the limitations of these approaches. A focus on the founders has allowed white Americans to avoid fully confronting the facts of slavery and racial prejudice in our past and, as a result, in our present.

This chapter shows that biblical criticism encouraged some figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, to abandon what they perceived as transient historical grounds for what they understood as a transcendent moral sphere. Many scholars have stressed the ahistorical aspects of Transcendental belief and emphasized the ways in which Transcendentalism outgrew its Unitarian roots. In doing so, however, they have often neglected to note how historical arguments freed heterodox thinkers such as Emerson and Parker in their attempts to build atemporal worlds. While most biblical scholars used historical readings to ground universal truths in a biblical past, these Transcendentalists employed historical explication to unmoor such truths from that historical setting. The growing perception of historical distance assisted them in that effort. As these and other thinkers drew attention to the shiftiness of historical evidence, the limitations of time, and the remoteness of the past, they exposed the transience of the historical grounds on which American Protetants based their faith.

This chapter shows how Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker used historical distance in their responses to Dred Scott. Parker tied the idea of the Constitution as the act of the ratifiers to the right of the people as interpreters. He believed that the founding generation’s expectation of abolition warranted a progressive popular reading. Lincoln insisted that the framers had used caution to word the Constitution in such a way that slavery would disappear from the American past once their descendants abolished the institution. That the Slave Power had obscured that expectation made it even more important to work towards its realization. Douglass also placed emphasis on the framers’ emancipationist expectations. He distinguished original antislavery meaning from obscuring post-founding-era construction and trusted that Americans would notice the distinction and then use the Constitution to usher in a new era of freedom. The slavery debates forced interpreters to confront historical distance, and Parker, Lincoln, and Douglass used it to insist on radically new readings of the Constitution. Historical distance had become an interpretive force in antebellum America.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s central contention that antebellum interpretive debates over slavery encouraged contextual readings of sacred texts and deepened a sense of historical distance from America’s favored biblical and founding pasts. It restates the argument that while some aimed to set aside the historical distance and change their readings revealed, others used distance and change in advancing new readings of the Bible and, especially, the Constitution. The conclusion narrates how Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln continued to use historical distance and the insight of historical contingency in working towards slavery’s abolition. Douglass found hope in Lincoln’s election, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and despite crucial differences between them, Douglass and Lincoln continued to advance antislavery readings of the Constitution based in the framers’ expectation of abolition. This reading gave shape to Lincoln’s Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address. The conclusion also indicates the limitations of approaches like Lincoln’s and emphasizes the need today for new kinds of historical narratives and new kinds of actions.

This chapter shows that thinkers across the antebellum religious spectrum, from Charles Hodge’s orthodox Calvinism to Andrews Norton’s liberal Unitarianism, accepted history as the favored battleground in debates about canon and religious truth. These developments had colonial roots, but flowered in the nineteenth century. Although America’s antebellum biblical scholars responded differently to developments in German biblical criticism, those developments led them to defend their canonical choices with historical arguments, base their hermeneutics in historical analysis, and center their epistemologies in historical knowledge. Even those who rejected aspects of historical interpretation nonetheless recognized the need to address historical readings. Whether in using historical readings or in dismissing them as dangerous or problematic, American biblical interpreters’ efforts highlighted crucial contextual differences between their world and the biblical pasts they looked to for guidance. In short, the stress on historical difference in biblical interpretation introduced a sense of historical distance, which carried with it the threat of questioning the Bible’s relevance.

This chapter focuses on the constitutional debates of the early 1850s, when many antislavery writers narrated both the progress of moral insight, which they viewed as embodied in the rise of antislavery sentiment, and the Slave Power’s advances, which they tracked in the Fugitive Slave Act, fugitive slave cases, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In attempts to reconcile their perceptions of both general moral progress and peculiar moral decline, these writers characterized proslavery advances as anachronistic deviations from founding-era expectations and slavery’s unexpected spread as antithetical to the egalitarian spirit of their age. All of this indicated just how different the revolutionary past was from the present, signaling to their contemporaries that it was time to realize the permanent truths that had been enunciated in the transient founding past. In short, antislavery writers promoted a historical consciousness attentive to historical distance: sometimes they narrated the growth of moral opposition to slavery since the founding, and sometimes they narrated the Slave Power’s rise since that time, but in both cases, they pointed to the reality of change over time.

This chapter shifts the focus to the Constitution by tracking the emergence of historical readings of the Constitution and showing how debates over slavery drew attention to the historical realities of change since and distance from the founding era. The very act of producing a written constitution initiated this development. At first, the move to see the new Constitution as archival contributed to its status as a sacred document, but that move also had the potential to rapidly desacralize the Constitution by revealing that its roots rested in a distinct temporal setting. The death of James Madison in 1836 sparked efforts to publish and use his writings to interpret the Constitution. The slavery debates shaped that usage. Some abolitionists followed William Lloyd Garrison in using Madison’s Papers to damn the Constitution, but many antislavery constitutionalists advanced interpretations that emphasized the framers’ anticipation of eventual emancipation. Coupled with a stress on slavery’s unexpected spread and the sudden rise of the Slave Power, these antislavery accounts of original expectation cultivated a new sense of temporal dislocation from America’s most useful past.