"An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer"--

Taking on decades of received wisdom, David Waldstreicher has written the first book to recognize slavery's place at the heart of the U.S. Constitution. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet, of its eighty-four clauses, six were directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clauses had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention...

Reveals the compromises made by men both driven and repelled by slavery and the needs of the slave economy that were made by the men creating the American Constitution. On September 17, 1787, at the State House in Philadelphia, thirty-nine men from twelve states signed America's Constitution after months of often bitter debate. They created a magnificent, enduring document, even though most of the delegates were driven more by pragmatic, regional...

"In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation may have been limited--freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines--but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln's leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment....

"A nightmare had been haunting Carolinians. In the fall of 1734, readers of the South Carolina Gazette learned of three separate revolts on sailing ships transporting Africans to bondage in the New World. In all three incidents, the Africans killed the ship's captain, and in two of the incidents the Africans took full control of the ship and its cargo. A few months later, the paper reported that black slaves had revolted on St. John in the Virgin...

"The evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War. On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America;...