No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures Book 18)

by Sean Wilentz

New Englanders, however, more than others, regarded the slightest connection to slavery as intolerable, and overlooked entirely the Constitution’s exclusion of property in man. “I must confess it will be very wonderful to me, if the Massachusettensians (above all people in the world) should hold up their hands to give efficacy to a constitution which admits of slavery,” the writer “Adelos” observed.10 “If we cannot connect with the southern states without giving countenance to blood and carnage, and all kinds of fraud and injustice,” “Phileleutheros” declared, “I say let them go.”11 For these writers, drawing a distinction between permitting slavery in state law and enshrining it in national law was so much flummery. For them, there could be no moral difference between tolerating slavery as the framers did and endorsing it outright. Their righteousness brooked no mitigation of the slaveholders’ unspeakable offenses to God. It also framed the attendant legal and political issues around their own moral purity.