Introduction

Summary

To read an American newspaper in 1860 was to trip constantly over invocations of the U.S. Constitution, usually stated with vigor and passion and infused with a sense of utter righteousness. “A Crime to Sustain the Law and the Constitution,” screamed the Weekly Wisconsin Patriot, in an article defending the state’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) or to recognize the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott (1857). The Fugitive Slave Act, which required local and state authorities to aid in the capture of escaped slaves, had never been popular in the free states (states that had abolished slavery). Dred Scott dramatically raised the stakes by allowing slaveholders not only to take slaves into free states and territories but also to keep them enslaved there indefinitely, in violation of those states’ and territories’ laws. For the editors of the Weekly Wisconsin Patriot the Constitution justified their opposition to federal policies that – as they saw it – elevated the protection of slavery over state laws that had abolished property in slaves. But those on the other side of the argument also invoked the Constitution. So far as the Augusta Chronicle was concerned, the Fugitive Slave Act was completely constitutional. So was property in slaves. The problem was the “reckless band of disorganizers” in the North “working to force the common government in a position ... to override the Constitution.”

Therein lay the conflict that led to secession. Critics of slavery feared that federal policies would perpetuate the institution and even allow for its extension into free states. Proponents of slavery feared that federal policies would undermine the power of slave states to maintain slavery. Yet the similarities were as striking as the differences. Both sides held up the Constitution, and the legal order it established, as the ultimate authority, the one that trumped all others. References to the Constitution were so ubiquitous on both sides of the debate that a traveler with no knowledge of context might be excused for confusion as to the nature of the sectional crisis. All the arguments came back to the U.S Constitution. Everyone revered it and claimed it as their own.