Chapter 5 demonstrates that the constitutional crisis over slavery reached the point of no return by 1860. Having no prospect of gaining majorities in Congress, the Southern minority believed that the presidency offered the main protection for slavery. Thus, Southerners were alarmed at the prospect of the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. They feared that his victory augured the beginning of a “dynasty” of antislavery presidents, who would abolish slavery. In response to the unprecedented event of the inauguration of an avowedly antislavery president, seven Southern states seceded. Citing compact theory, some Southerners claimed that secession was a constitutional right. In contrast, most Northerners rejected secession as an existential threat to the Constitution itself. Unfortunately, the Constitution permitted ambiguous readings of the matters in dispute. If the constitutionality of secession was uncertain, then so was federal coercion of the seceded states. If the states could not secede, but the federal government could not compel them to return to the Union, then the only solution was compromise. As the previous grand compromises had not solved the disputes surrounding slavery, there was widespread agreement that an amendment was necessary. Unfortunately, the Constitution made passing an amendment nearly impossible during a crisis.

Chapter 3 looks at how the Southern minority used the three-fifths clause, the Electoral College, and parity in the Senate to protect itself from “tyranny” of the Northern majority. Even with the three-fifths clause, the South could not overcome the North’s increasing population advantage. Nonetheless, the three-fifths clause’s “slave bonus” did limit the South’s losses in the House. While the South’s determination to have the number of slave states equal the number of free states ensured that the North would not have a majority. Both parity in the Senate and the three-fifths clause inflated the South’s representation in the Electoral College. Of these two proslavery constitutional provisions, parity in the Senate provided greater protection to the South. Northerners understood only too well the political benefits the three-fifths clause and parity in the Senate conferred upon the South. Antislavery advocates bristled at this, while conservatives believed it was the result of the Founders’ grand plan. Both Northerners and Southerners realized that the three-fifths clause and parity in the Senate added to the difficulty of securing congressional approval of an antislavery amendment. In 1850, the South lost parity in the Senate, never to regain it.

Chapter 1 examines how ordinary antebellum Americans cherished the Constitution for enshrining their “free institutions” of freedom of speech, press, and religion as well as representative democracy and local self-government. Indeed, Americans boasted that the Constitution had given them a form of government that was superior to any other in the world. At the same time that they gloried in the Constitution, mid-nineteenth-century Americans were divided by the Constitution. Slavery, more than any other issue, drove the division. Except for a tiny group of radicals, antislavery Northerners believed the Constitution was either antislavery or at least neutral towards slave labor. Northern conservatives and some moderate Southerners held that the Constitution countenanced slavery and they accepted this as the price for a constitutional union of free states and slave states. Most white Southerners believed that the Constitution was avowedly proslavery. This three-way debate carried over to the lives and intentions of the Founders and the proper way to interpret their Constitution. Southerners believed that the Constitution was avowedly pro-slavery. This three-way debate carried over to the lives and intentions of the Founders and the proper way to interpret their Constitution.

Chapter 2 focuses on the international slave trade clause and the fugitive slave clause. The Constitution permitted Americans to ply that “infamous traffic” for two decades, but the Founders hoped that American slavery would end after the slave trade ceased to supply new chattels. Instead, the American slave population expanded. In the 1850s, a small band of fire-eaters tried to overturn the federal ban on the slave trade. In a couple of notorious cases, Southern juries refused to convict slave traders despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. At the same time that these slave traders brought the slave trade clause to the fore, enslaved persons did the same for the fugitive slave clause, making it the most contentious of the Constitution’s compromises over slavery. While all Southerners and many Northerners agreed that the return of fugitive slaves was a constitutional duty, some abolitionists shirked this obligation and a tiny minority actively flouted the law. Northern juries declined to convict slave rescuers. The actions of the slave rescuers and the slave traders called into question the commitment of the North and the South to the rule of constitutional law.