Slavery was the only domestic institution the Constitution protected, albeit indirectly, by means of the three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses, and the only institution the federal government was empowered to move against, also indirectly, by banning slavery from the territories and shutting down the Atlantic slave trade. The federal consensus had similarly ambiguous implications. Proslavery southerners claimed—and antislavery northerners agreed—that the federal government could not constitutionally “interfere” with slavery in their states. But by the 1840s political abolitionists were
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