The prologue spotlights twenty-first-century uses of both the founding era and the biblical past to introduce the book’s central contention that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery cultivated a sense of historical distance in antebellum America. The prologue points to examples of how contemporary Americans both ignore and highlight historical distance in making political use of the founding era and the biblical past. It suggests that in both the antebellum era and in the twenty-first century, politics has shaped American approaches to these pasts and their corrsponding texts – the Bible and the Constitution. At the same time, the prologue maintains that the idea of the past as distant, which has become a common assumption in our period, only began to emerge in the antebellum era. To highlight the continuities and differences between antebellum and twenty-first century thought, the prologue references phrases such as “black lives matter” and “make America great again,” even as it points towards its central focus on the antebellum developments that shed light on the meanings of such phrases.

The Dred Scott decision embodied how the debates over slavery held unique potential to deepen Americans’ awareness of historical distance. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney accepted the historical grounds of debate that had been prepared through decades of interpretive emphasis on the historical explication. He then argued that because the founders had not considered blacks as citizens in 1787, blacks could not be citizens in 1857. In this reading, Taney forcefully rejected the antislavery idea that the progress of moral insight demanded new constitutional readings. However, in their dissenting opinions, John McLean and Benjamin Curtis gave official credence to much of that antislavery idea. They suggested that the Constitution could be adapted in light of original expectations of abolition. These opinions, along with political and popular responses to the decision, accelerated a growing sense that more than just chronological difference separated nineteenth-century Americans from their revolutionary predecessors. In their appeals to the founding era, the justices and their respondents highlighted unmistakable historical differences between that past and their present.

This chapter surveys the historical, political, and legal problems confronting the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. It describes the antebellum debate over whether free blacks were "citizens of the United States" entitled to comity rights, the travails of abolitionists, the rampant private violence and mob rule and inadequate protection of the laws, and the abridgment of the civil rights of the newly freed people in the infamous Black Codes.

Chapter 4 details how antebellum Americans followed the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution. Conservative Northerners embodied the “spirit of 1787,” aiding the Southern minority on matters relating to slavery when the explicit provisions of the Constitution were not sufficient. These conservative Northerners did their constitutional duty by providing sectional balance to proslavery presidential tickets, thereby giving the appearance that the South did not dominate the executive branch. In Congress, conservative Northerners also voted with Southerners on sectional bills, blocking antislavery measures and passing proslavery ones. The most important of these bills formed the grand sectional compromises: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850. These compromises gained the aura of de facto constitutional amendments. Unfortunately, these grand sectional compromises did not solve the constitutional problems raised by slavery; they only delayed the final reckoning. On the federal bench, Northern conservatives cast votes for and occasionally wrote proslavery decisions, including most notoriously Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Thus, all three branches of the government established by the Constitution were affected by the sectional struggle over slavery.