No constitutional right of property in man. Due process for fugitive slaves. The privileges and immunities of citizens for all Blacks in the territories. A Constitution that protects freedom rather than slavery wherever the US government was sovereign. It’s no wonder the slave states began to secede from the Union as soon as Lincoln was elected. It was not simply his party’s promise to keep slavery out of the territories. Far more frightening to the slaveholders was the increasingly aggressive antislavery constitutionalism, openly and unabashedly proclaimed by Lincoln and his fellow
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