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

After 1815, as antislavery agitation became much more formidable, the distinction—and, specifically, the framers’ exclusion of property in man—became the constitutional basis for the politics that in time led to slavery’s destruction.