And yet when the Constitution was ratified there was no such thing as proslavery or antislavery constitutionalism. Both developed over time, and by 1820 the two competing interpretations of the Constitution were substantially elaborated during the protracted debates over the admission of Missouri to statehood. It is a mistake, then, to think of the proslavery Constitution as original and the antislavery Constitution as a latter-day invention. The two Constitutions emerged in reaction to each other, and they continued to develop through the last decades of the antebellum era, each side solemnly
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