Pushkin. This is The Broken Constitution, a miniseries for unknown history from quick and dirty tips and deep background from Pushkin Industries. Over three episodes, I'm going to talk about Abraham Lincoln and how he needed to break the American Constitution in order to remake it. It's all based on my new book, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America, out November second. If you're listening to this podcast, you already know that one of the most important and pressing questions facing the United States today is whether racism and slavery are encoded into the DNA of our nation by virtue of being encoded into the US Constitution. This question is behind debates about who we are, what we should teach, and what the possibilities are for our nation going into the future, especially with respect to racial equality. I wrote this book because I wanted to know the answer. I've devoted most of my professional life to thinking about the US Constitution and about other constitutions, whether in Iraq or Tunisia or anywhere else around the world. I'd written books about James Madison and the drafting of the US Constitution, as well as its ratification and I'd also written a book about the interpretation of the Constitution in the modern period, starting with the justices appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the nineteen thirties and going all the way up into the nineteen sixties. That study gave me a foundation in trying to answer the question. But I must tell you that I was genuinely astonished by many of the things that I discovered in researching this book, and the answer that I reached is not the answer that I thought I was going to reach when I began. My surprise can be summed up in three simple propositions, each of which I believed and each of which I now think is wrong. I thought that from the start our Constitution in the United States functioned as a higher moral law guiding us into the future. It did not. I thought we had the same constitution that we had had since it was drafted in seventeen eighty seven and ratified in a couple of years afterwards. As it turns out, we do not. And perhaps most surprisingly, I always thought of Abraham Lincoln as the president who saved the US Constitution. In fact, however, the truth is that Abraham Lincoln did not save our Constitution. He broke the Constitution three separate times, in three separate ways, in order to transform it into something very new and very different. Over the course of this mini series, I'm going to discuss all three of these ideas misconceptions, really, and I'm going to tell you a story, the story of Abraham Lincoln's own engagement with the Constitution and what it reveals not only about his tremendous importance as a thinker about the Constitution, but also about the Constitution itself. In this first episode, I'm going to suggest that the Constitution Abraham Lincoln supported was not a moral blueprint for our nation or a higher law that the great majority of Americans could support and treat as guiding them into the future. Instead, the Constitution of the United States until the Civil War was a compromise constitution, and that compromise was one that Abraham Lincoln himself was entirely devoted to preserving. What made the Constitution a compromise everybody remembers from eighth grade Civics that the original Constitution of seventeen eighty seven contained a major compromise between the large and the small states. That was the compromise that created popular representation in the House of Representatives, but treated all states as the same with respect to representation in the Senate. That was a big fight in Philadelphia in the long hot summer of seventeen eighty seven, and it culminated, indeed in a walkout where the small states told the large states, unless you give us equal representation in the Senate, we're not going to participate in the Constitution at all. But as the summer progressed, the most astute delegates there began to realize that the real conflict that was going to emerge in the United States, and they could already be sensed in the Convention, was not between large and small states. It was between northern states that were either free or on their way to becoming free states, and Southern states that were committed to slavery as crucial to their economic way of life. The compromise that took place in seventeen eighty seven between the northern and the Southern states had three components each and every one of them was connected to slavery. The first was the three fifths compromise. The South wanted enslaved persons of African descent to be counted as full persons for the purpose of representation. Their idea, of course, was that the enslaved persons would never have the opportunity to vote, but by counting slaves, Southern states would have greater representation in the House of Representatives because slaves made up a significant part of the Southern population. Northern states, in contrast, did not want to count slaves at all in total numbers for representation in the House of Representatives because they believed that because enslaved persons did not have the right to vote, it followed that they shouldn't be counted, and that would give the North more proportional representation in the House of Representatives. The three fifths compromise was designed to placate both sides. It gave each side part of what it wanted, and of course, into the bargain, it had the symbolic effect of treating slaves as only three fifths of human beings. The second compromise having to do with slavery was one which we barely remember today, and that was a guarantee in the Constitution that the international trade in slaves, importing slaves into the United States would be protected for twenty years from the time of the ratification of the Constitution. The idea here was that in the very deepest part of the South, especially South Carolina, slaveholders felt that they needed many, many more slaves than they already had in order to expand their economies. To do that, they wanted to be sure of a steady supply of enslaved persons brought from Africa, and they knew that international opposition to the slave trade, including opposition in the North, was growing and strong. It's important to keep in mind here that even many people who thought that slavery was morally acceptable at the time, including many in the North, drew the line at the idea of capturing people, turning them into slaves, and importing them across international waters to North America. It was not unusual for people to oppose the slave trade without opposing slavery. The Constitution guaranteed in an unamendable way that for twenty years slaves could still be imported. After that, it would be up to Congress to determine whether the slave trade would be ended, as indeed it was. The last compromise is one that it's easy to forget today, but that was in fact the most significant from the standpoint of Americans in the eighteen hundreds, and that was the compromise over the fugitive Slave Clause. The fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution specified that if enslaved people were to flee from slave states in the South two free states in the North, not only would they not become free by entering into free territory, but beyond that, they would be returned to their owners. What was so fundamentally significant about the fugitive Slave clause was that it implicated the North fully in the practice of slavery. It meant that even states that abolished slavery themselves would still have to participate in the realities of slavery by lending their legal systems to the capture and return of enslaves to the status of slavery. You may ask, especially if you've seen the musical Hamilton, how could it be that Northerners at the Constitutional Convention, a few of whom were at least skeptical about the morality of slavery, could have agreed to these propositions. The short answer is compromise was necessary as a condition for actually getting the Constitution to be successfully agreed upon by all sides, and even Hamilton himself, who was perhaps not as fully committed to abolition as lin Manuel Miranda would have us think. Hamilton actively defended this compromise, and he described the three fifths proposition by saying the quote, it was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention, and without this indulgence, no union could possibly have been formed. That sentence explicitly articulated what everybody knew. The Constitution was a compromise, and it was a compromise between slaveholders and non slaveholders and accommodation without which there could not have been a continuing union. What did Abraham Lincoln himself think about this compromise Constitution when he was a young man living in Illinois. The short answer is that Lincoln was a complete and total supporter of the compromise Constitution. When it came to politics, his choice from early on in his career was to support the Whig Party and to idolize the founder and leading figure in the Whig Party, a man called Henry Clay, famous in American history with the name the Great Compromiser. None of this is a coincidence. Lincoln didn't have to be a follower of Clay or a wig. In fact, as a self made young man at the frontier, he might naturally have become a follower of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. Yet Lincoln's personality, his experiences, and his attitudes drew him to Clay. That made Lincoln into somebody who was fundamentally committed to the ideal of compromise. Lincoln's commitment to the Constitution as a compromised document can be seen in his first really important political speech, which he gave in eighteen thirty eight. The speech was a defense of what Lincoln called the perpetuation of our political institutions. His main point was that unless Americans would abide by the rule of law, the Constitution and the country were doomed to collapse. In the course of this speech, Lincoln insisted that the overarching value of constitutional life must be reason, what he called sober reason, cold calculating, unimpassioned reason, and this reason, Lincoln said, should be molded into a reverence for the Constitution and laws. The Constitution must be revered for its coldness, its lack of passion, and its commitment to reason. Starkly absent from this account was any commitment to the idea that the Constitution was fundamentally morally right. Lincoln, of course himself was not fond of slavery from the moment. We have a record of what he thought about it. He considered the practice cruel and preferred that it not exists. And yet Lincoln remained committed to the idea that slavery needed to be preserved in the Constitution. How did Lincoln and other mainstream figures in nineteenth century America reconcile these two thoughts. In Lincoln's case, the answer was one that he inherited from Henry Clay, who himself had inherited it from James Madison and James Monroe. This was the idea, the hope, really, the aspiration at best, that slavery would die what Lincoln called unnatural death. The theory here was that somehow, as if by magic, slavery would cease to be economically viable, and that Southerners would, as a consequence, stop relying on it as the basis for their economies. As a loyal son of the old Northwest and of Illinois, Lincoln himself was not committed to slavery, which he always viewed negatively, but the world in which he lived and the economy of the people whom he eventually sought to represent as he entered politics, depended on the expansion of the country across the continent, eventually all the way to California, and that expansion, in turn was completely bound up in the expansion of slavery. Over the course of the eighteen hundreds, the Constitution was therefore gradually reaffirmed as a blueprint for the capacity of the country to expand. In order to cross the continent and achieve what came to be called manifest destiny, the country needed to be unified. It couldn't be broken into two or three different mini republics, which might establish tariffs and other limitations on trade as among them now. Notwithstanding the felt necessity by Northerners, Westerners, and Southerners of maintaining unity, the eighteen hundreds still saw a succession of major crises, which played themselves out as crises around the Constitution. The Constitution, in practical terms, was a compromised deal between slaveholders and non slaveholders designed to facilitate expansion. But each and every time that the country expanded to include territory that would become part of a new state, the compromise came into doubt. If they were free, that might give the North an ultimate advantage and the capacity to alter the terms of the deal and make slavery less powerful or indeed eliminated. If, on the other hand, the new states were to be admitted to the Union as slave states, that would create circumstances where the slave states might be able over time to transform the Union into an entirely slave entity, in which the Northern states, even if they didn't have slavery, would be further and further implicated in the practice. Not by the design of seventeen eighty seven, but rather by gradual realism. A fifty fifty balance in the Senate had been established between slave states and free states, and the crises of the eighteen twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, coupled with the compromises that purported to save them, were all focused on the question of the balance of the Senate as it would be shaped by the admission of new states. The paradox, then was that the compromises were necessary to maintain balance, and the balance was necessary to achieve expansion, but the expansion itself created doubt about the capacities of the compromise to exist. Throughout this period of time, Lincoln committed himself to a centrist position. He repeatedly denounced abolitionists as people who were doing something unwise, namely trying to undermine the very balance that was crucial to the existence of compromise. At the same time, he maintained a moral objection to slavery, one that he expressed more and more clearly during these years. The way for Lincoln and others to achieve some kind of coherence, if you can call it, that, was to remind themselves and everybody else that the Constitution was a set of rules that deserved reverence and obedience because everyone had promised to follow it as part of a compromised deal. The idea that you had a moral duty to keep an agreement which was itself all about an immoral arrangement, required tremendous conscious analysis of the problem and simultaneously tremendous denial of the fundamental immorality that underlay it. And it's not as though nobody in the United States at the time was thinking about the contradictions of this compromise. They were abolitionists in the United States in the eighteen hundreds made it extraordinarily clear that to agree to the compromise Constitution was to be committed to what the abolitionist Wendell Phillips called an agreement with death and a covenant with Hell. Before ending this episode, I want to share with you some fascinating material that I was able to discover with the help of my research assistance. This material consists of debates among African American abolitionists in the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties about whether the original Constitution was itself so immoral that any accommodation to it made the person who accommodated also immoral. Consider as an example, a fascinating debate that took place on January sixth, eighteen fifty one, at the sixth State Convention of Colored Citizens of Ohio, held in Columbus. State conventions of free African Americans had become common by the eighteen fifties. In this particular convention, a debate broke out between two significant African American abolitionists, one a man called Hezekiah Ford Douglas, who had escaped being a slave at the age of fifteen and went on later to command his own unit in the Civil War, and on the other side, a man called William Howard Day, originally born free in New York, a graduate of Oberlin College, who would become the founder and editor of a weekly Cleveland newspaper with the extraordinary name The Aliened American. The subject of the debate was whether it was appropriate for African Americans who were free to vote in states where they were free to vote, such as Ohio. Hezekiah, for Douglas, took the view that it was immoral for a free African American to vote in a federal election, because to do so was to implicate oneself in the immorality of the Compromise Constitution. As Douglas put it, I hold sir, that the Constitution of the United States is pro slavery, considered so by those who framed it and construed to that end ever since its adoption. This was simply a historical fact, as Douglas and his listeners knew, the Compromise Constitution did enshrine slavery, and Douglas went on, we are, all, according to Congressional enactments, involved in the horrible system of human bondage by virtue of the fact that Congress had enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in fulfillment of the constitutional promise of the Fugitive Slave Clause. Douglas was saying everyone who voted for Congress was morally implicated in their perpetuation of slavery. His conclusion was, although African Americans were free to vote in federal elections in Ohio, they should not do so. William Howard Day fundamentally disagreed. He took the view that although the Constitution could be construed or interpreted as pro slavery, he refused to interpret it that way. In fact, he said, even though the Supreme Court of the United States has given aid to slavery by their unjust and illegal decisions, that is not the Constitution. Those decisions, he said, are not that under which I vote. Day drew an analogy between the Bible, which could be misinterpreted but should be interpreted correctly, and the Constitution, which had been misinterpreted, he said, but should be interpreted differently. Day went on to give a pragmatic explanation for why he wanted to rely on the Constitution as a weapon to fight against slavery. Sir, he said, coming up as I do in the midst of three millions of men in chains, and five hundred thousand only half free. I consider every instrument precious which guarantees to me liberty. I consider the Constitution a foundation of American liberties, and wrapping myself in the flag of the nation, I would plant myself upon that Constitution, and using the weapons they have given me, I would appeal to the American people for the rights thus guaranteed. William Howard Day was saying that whatever the immorality of a constitution might be, as applied, he preferred to wrap himself in the Constitution as a patriotic basis for making an anti slavery argument. You could see here, in almost all of its detail, a version of the argument that we are still having today as a country. Should the Constitution be interpreted in the light of the recognition of slavery that initially included, or should the Stution instead be read against the grain as a document that could be used to fight against slavery. Notwithstanding that history, in this particular debate, in the years before the Civil War and the eventual emancipation of slaves and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Hezekiah for Douglas got the last word. Responding today's plan of wrapping himself in the flag, Douglas said, the gentleman may wrap the stars and stripe of his country around him forty times, and with a declaration of independence in one hand and the constitution of our common country and the other, may seat himself under the shadow of the frowning monument of Bunker Hill. And if the slaveholder, under the constitution and with the fugitive bill don't find you, then there don't exist a constitution. Hezekiah for Douglas was saying that even if a black man were to be in Massachusetts, where slavery was outlawed, and sitting under the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, and wrapped in the stars and stripes, with the Constitution in one hand and the declaration in the other, he would still be treated by the law as an escaped slave, and the federal fugitive Slave law would still lead the slave catcher to grab him up in Massachusetts and treat him as a slave. In the next several episodes, I'm going to describe to you the crisis of Southern Secession, the war, and the consequences of Lincoln's three major acts of breaking the Constitution as it was known at the time. I'll suggest you that those acts eventually had a transformative effect on the Constitution as it stood up to the moment of the Civil War. That in turn will lead me to suggest that the Compromise Constitution that existed up to the Civil War, with its character of fundamental willingness to incorporate immorality, is not the Constitution that we still have today. For this episode, though, I want to leave you with the words of Frederick Douglas, the most important abolitionist of them all. Over the course of his career, Douglas had different points of view on how the Constitution should be considered. Early on, he was committed to the view that it was fundamentally immoral. Later, in the run up to the Civil War, he shifted to the alternative view that the Constitution should be read against its own words and against its own history, as a document that could promote freedom in between. However, in eighteen fifty Douglas describe things in words that seemed to my mind entirely accurate. Here's what he said about the Compromise Constitution. Liberty and slavery opposite, as heaven and hell are both in the Constitution, Douglas said, and the oath to support the Constitution is an oath to perform that which God has made impossible. The Constitution was, Douglas concluded, at war with itself. But those words that an oath to support the Constitution is an oath to perform that which God has made impossible a self contradiction, and the support of a document at war with itself precisely captures the situation that Abraham Lincoln would find himself in just ten years after Douglas spoke those words. When Lincoln was elected president, the Southern States seceded, and he was required to consider what the oath of office to support, protect, and defend the Constitution should mean in practice to him. To hear more about that, listen to the next episode of this podcast, The Broken Constitution, coming to you in one week. If you can't wait, you can listen to the next episode a few days early on the Unknown History podcast from Quick and Dirty Tips. Find it in the show notes or your favorite podcast app, and go ahead and pre order or by The Broken Constitution from your favorite local bookstore. It's out on November second. The Broken Constitution was produced by Nathan's SEMs and Quick and Dirty Tips, a proud part of McMillan publisher's home of far Strauss and Jeru, who are publishing my book

Pushkin. This is The Broken Constitution, a miniseries for unknown history from quick and dirty tips and deep background from Pushkin Industries. Over three episodes, I'm going to talk about Abraham Lincoln and how he needed to break the American Constitution in order to remake it. It's all based on my new book, The Broken Constitution, Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America, out November second. If you're listening to this podcast, you already know that one of the most important and pressing questions facing the United States today is whether racism and slavery are encoded into the DNA of our nation by virtue of being encoded into the US Constitution. This question is behind debates about who we are, what we should teach, and what the possibilities are for our nation going into the future, especially with respect to racial equality. I wrote this book because I wanted to know the answer. I've devoted most of my professional life to thinking about the US Constitution and about other constitutions, whether in Iraq or Tunisia or anywhere else around the world. I'd written books about James Madison and the drafting of the US Constitution, as well as its ratification and I'd also written a book about the interpretation of the Constitution in the modern period, starting with the justices appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the nineteen thirties and going all the way up into the nineteen sixties. That study gave me a foundation in trying to answer the question. But I must tell you that I was genuinely astonished by many of the things that I discovered in researching this book, and the answer that I reached is not the answer that I thought I was going to reach when I began. My surprise can be summed up in three simple propositions, each of which I believed and each of which I now think is wrong. I thought that from the start our Constitution in the United States functioned as a higher moral law guiding us into the future. It did not. I thought we had the same constitution that we had had since it was drafted in seventeen eighty seven and ratified in a couple of years afterwards. As it turns out, we do not. And perhaps most surprisingly, I always thought of Abraham Lincoln as the president who saved the US Constitution. In fact, however, the truth is that Abraham Lincoln did not save our Constitution. He broke the Constitution three separate times, in three separate ways, in order to transform it into something very new and very different. Over the course of this mini series, I'm going to discuss all three of these ideas misconceptions, really, and I'm going to tell you a story, the story of Abraham Lincoln's own engagement with the Constitution and what it reveals not only about his tremendous importance as a thinker about the Constitution, but also about the Constitution itself. In this first episode, I'm going to suggest that the Constitution Abraham Lincoln supported was not a moral blueprint for our nation or a higher law that the great majority of Americans could support and treat as guiding them into the future. Instead, the Constitution of the United States until the Civil War was a compromise constitution, and that compromise was one that Abraham Lincoln himself was entirely devoted to preserving. What made the Constitution a compromise everybody remembers from eighth grade Civics that the original Constitution of seventeen eighty seven contained a major compromise between the large and the small states. That was the compromise that created popular representation in the House of Representatives, but treated all states as the same with respect to representation in the Senate. That was a big fight in Philadelphia in the long hot summer of seventeen eighty seven, and it culminated, indeed in a walkout where the small states told the large states, unless you give us equal representation in the Senate, we're not going to participate in the Constitution at all. But as the summer progressed, the most astute delegates there began to realize that the real conflict that was going to emerge in the United States, and they could already be sensed in the Convention, was not between large and small states. It was between northern states that were either free or on their way to becoming free states, and Southern states that were committed to slavery as crucial to their economic way of life. The compromise that took place in seventeen eighty seven between the northern and the Southern states had three components each and every one of them was connected to slavery. The first was the three fifths compromise. The South wanted enslaved persons of African descent to be counted as full persons for the purpose of representation. Their idea, of course, was that the enslaved persons would never have the opportunity to vote, but by counting slaves, Southern states would have greater representation in the House of Representatives because slaves made up a significant part of the Southern population. Northern states, in contrast, did not want to count slaves at all in total numbers for representation in the House of Representatives because they believed that because enslaved persons did not have the right to vote, it followed that they shouldn't be counted, and that would give the North more proportional representation in the House of Representatives. The three fifths compromise was designed to placate both sides. It gave each side part of what it wanted, and of course, into the bargain, it had the symbolic effect of treating slaves as only three fifths of human beings. The second compromise having to do with slavery was one which we barely remember today, and that was a guarantee in the Constitution that the international trade in slaves, importing slaves into the United States would be protected for twenty years from the time of the ratification of the Constitution. The idea here was that in the very deepest part of the South, especially South Carolina, slaveholders felt that they needed many, many more slaves than they already had in order to expand their economies. To do that, they wanted to be sure of a steady supply of enslaved persons brought from Africa, and they knew that international opposition to the slave trade, including opposition in the North, was growing and strong. It's important to keep in mind here that even many people who thought that slavery was morally acceptable at the time, including many in the North, drew the line at the idea of capturing people, turning them into slaves, and importing them across international waters to North America. It was not unusual for people to oppose the slave trade without opposing slavery. The Constitution guaranteed in an unamendable way that for twenty years slaves could still be imported. After that, it would be up to Congress to determine whether the slave trade would be ended, as indeed it was. The last compromise is one that it's easy to forget today, but that was in fact the most significant from the standpoint of Americans in the eighteen hundreds, and that was the compromise over the fugitive Slave Clause. The fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution specified that if enslaved people were to flee from slave states in the South two free states in the North, not only would they not become free by entering into free territory, but beyond that, they would be returned to their owners. What was so fundamentally significant about the fugitive Slave clause was that it implicated the North fully in the practice of slavery. It meant that even states that abolished slavery themselves would still have to participate in the realities of slavery by lending their legal systems to the capture and return of enslaves to the status of slavery. You may ask, especially if you've seen the musical Hamilton, how could it be that Northerners at the Constitutional Convention, a few of whom were at least skeptical about the morality of slavery, could have agreed to these propositions. The short answer is compromise was necessary as a condition for actually getting the Constitution to be successfully agreed upon by all sides, and even Hamilton himself, who was perhaps not as fully committed to abolition as lin Manuel Miranda would have us think. Hamilton actively defended this compromise, and he described the three fifths proposition by saying the quote, it was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention, and without this indulgence, no union could possibly have been formed. That sentence explicitly articulated what everybody knew. The Constitution was a compromise, and it was a compromise between slaveholders and non slaveholders and accommodation without which there could not have been a continuing union. What did Abraham Lincoln himself think about this compromise Constitution when he was a young man living in Illinois. The short answer is that Lincoln was a complete and total supporter of the compromise Constitution. When it came to politics, his choice from early on in his career was to support the Whig Party and to idolize the founder and leading figure in the Whig Party, a man called Henry Clay, famous in American history with the name the Great Compromiser. None of this is a coincidence. Lincoln didn't have to be a follower of Clay or a wig. In fact, as a self made young man at the frontier, he might naturally have become a follower of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. Yet Lincoln's personality, his experiences, and his attitudes drew him to Clay. That made Lincoln into somebody who was fundamentally committed to the ideal of compromise. Lincoln's commitment to the Constitution as a compromised document can be seen in his first really important political speech, which he gave in eighteen thirty eight. The speech was a defense of what Lincoln called the perpetuation of our political institutions. His main point was that unless Americans would abide by the rule of law, the Constitution and the country were doomed to collapse. In the course of this speech, Lincoln insisted that the overarching value of constitutional life must be reason, what he called sober reason, cold calculating, unimpassioned reason, and this reason, Lincoln said, should be molded into a reverence for the Constitution and laws. The Constitution must be revered for its coldness, its lack of passion, and its commitment to reason. Starkly absent from this account was any commitment to the idea that the Constitution was fundamentally morally right. Lincoln, of course himself was not fond of slavery from the moment. We have a record of what he thought about it. He considered the practice cruel and preferred that it not exists. And yet Lincoln remained committed to the idea that slavery needed to be preserved in the Constitution. How did Lincoln and other mainstream figures in nineteenth century America reconcile these two thoughts. In Lincoln's case, the answer was one that he inherited from Henry Clay, who himself had inherited it from James Madison and James Monroe. This was the idea, the hope, really, the aspiration at best, that slavery would die what Lincoln called unnatural death. The theory here was that somehow, as if by magic, slavery would cease to be economically viable, and that Southerners would, as a consequence, stop relying on it as the basis for their economies. As a loyal son of the old Northwest and of Illinois, Lincoln himself was not committed to slavery, which he always viewed negatively, but the world in which he lived and the economy of the people whom he eventually sought to represent as he entered politics, depended on the expansion of the country across the continent, eventually all the way to California, and that expansion, in turn was completely bound up in the expansion of slavery. Over the course of the eighteen hundreds, the Constitution was therefore gradually reaffirmed as a blueprint for the capacity of the country to expand. In order to cross the continent and achieve what came to be called manifest destiny, the country needed to be unified. It couldn't be broken into two or three different mini republics, which might establish tariffs and other limitations on trade as among them now. Notwithstanding the felt necessity by Northerners, Westerners, and Southerners of maintaining unity, the eighteen hundreds still saw a succession of major crises, which played themselves out as crises around the Constitution. The Constitution, in practical terms, was a compromised deal between slaveholders and non slaveholders designed to facilitate expansion. But each and every time that the country expanded to include territory that would become part of a new state, the compromise came into doubt. If they were free, that might give the North an ultimate advantage and the capacity to alter the terms of the deal and make slavery less powerful or indeed eliminated. If, on the other hand, the new states were to be admitted to the Union as slave states, that would create circumstances where the slave states might be able over time to transform the Union into an entirely slave entity, in which the Northern states, even if they didn't have slavery, would be further and further implicated in the practice. Not by the design of seventeen eighty seven, but rather by gradual realism. A fifty fifty balance in the Senate had been established between slave states and free states, and the crises of the eighteen twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, coupled with the compromises that purported to save them, were all focused on the question of the balance of the Senate as it would be shaped by the admission of new states. The paradox, then was that the compromises were necessary to maintain balance, and the balance was necessary to achieve expansion, but the expansion itself created doubt about the capacities of the compromise to exist. Throughout this period of time, Lincoln committed himself to a centrist position. He repeatedly denounced abolitionists as people who were doing something unwise, namely trying to undermine the very balance that was crucial to the existence of compromise. At the same time, he maintained a moral objection to slavery, one that he expressed more and more clearly during these years. The way for Lincoln and others to achieve some kind of coherence, if you can call it, that, was to remind themselves and everybody else that the Constitution was a set of rules that deserved reverence and obedience because everyone had promised to follow it as part of a compromised deal. The idea that you had a moral duty to keep an agreement which was itself all about an immoral arrangement, required tremendous conscious analysis of the problem and simultaneously tremendous denial of the fundamental immorality that underlay it. And it's not as though nobody in the United States at the time was thinking about the contradictions of this compromise. They were abolitionists in the United States in the eighteen hundreds made it extraordinarily clear that to agree to the compromise Constitution was to be committed to what the abolitionist Wendell Phillips called an agreement with death and a covenant with Hell. Before ending this episode, I want to share with you some fascinating material that I was able to discover with the help of my research assistance. This material consists of debates among African American abolitionists in the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties about whether the original Constitution was itself so immoral that any accommodation to it made the person who accommodated also immoral. Consider as an example, a fascinating debate that took place on January sixth, eighteen fifty one, at the sixth State Convention of Colored Citizens of Ohio, held in Columbus. State conventions of free African Americans had become common by the eighteen fifties. In this particular convention, a debate broke out between two significant African American abolitionists, one a man called Hezekiah Ford Douglas, who had escaped being a slave at the age of fifteen and went on later to command his own unit in the Civil War, and on the other side, a man called William Howard Day, originally born free in New York, a graduate of Oberlin College, who would become the founder and editor of a weekly Cleveland newspaper with the extraordinary name The Aliened American. The subject of the debate was whether it was appropriate for African Americans who were free to vote in states where they were free to vote, such as Ohio. Hezekiah, for Douglas, took the view that it was immoral for a free African American to vote in a federal election, because to do so was to implicate oneself in the immorality of the Compromise Constitution. As Douglas put it, I hold sir, that the Constitution of the United States is pro slavery, considered so by those who framed it and construed to that end ever since its adoption. This was simply a historical fact, as Douglas and his listeners knew, the Compromise Constitution did enshrine slavery, and Douglas went on, we are, all, according to Congressional enactments, involved in the horrible system of human bondage by virtue of the fact that Congress had enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in fulfillment of the constitutional promise of the Fugitive Slave Clause. Douglas was saying everyone who voted for Congress was morally implicated in their perpetuation of slavery. His conclusion was, although African Americans were free to vote in federal elections in Ohio, they should not do so. William Howard Day fundamentally disagreed. He took the view that although the Constitution could be construed or interpreted as pro slavery, he refused to interpret it that way. In fact, he said, even though the Supreme Court of the United States has given aid to slavery by their unjust and illegal decisions, that is not the Constitution. Those decisions, he said, are not that under which I vote. Day drew an analogy between the Bible, which could be misinterpreted but should be interpreted correctly, and the Constitution, which had been misinterpreted, he said, but should be interpreted differently. Day went on to give a pragmatic explanation for why he wanted to rely on the Constitution as a weapon to fight against slavery. Sir, he said, coming up as I do in the midst of three millions of men in chains, and five hundred thousand only half free. I consider every instrument precious which guarantees to me liberty. I consider the Constitution a foundation of American liberties, and wrapping myself in the flag of the nation, I would plant myself upon that Constitution, and using the weapons they have given me, I would appeal to the American people for the rights thus guaranteed. William Howard Day was saying that whatever the immorality of a constitution might be, as applied, he preferred to wrap himself in the Constitution as a patriotic basis for making an anti slavery argument. You could see here, in almost all of its detail, a version of the argument that we are still having today as a country. Should the Constitution be interpreted in the light of the recognition of slavery that initially included, or should the Stution instead be read against the grain as a document that could be used to fight against slavery. Notwithstanding that history, in this particular debate, in the years before the Civil War and the eventual emancipation of slaves and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Hezekiah for Douglas got the last word. Responding today's plan of wrapping himself in the flag, Douglas said, the gentleman may wrap the stars and stripe of his country around him forty times, and with a declaration of independence in one hand and the constitution of our common country and the other, may seat himself under the shadow of the frowning monument of Bunker Hill. And if the slaveholder, under the constitution and with the fugitive bill don't find you, then there don't exist a constitution. Hezekiah for Douglas was saying that even if a black man were to be in Massachusetts, where slavery was outlawed, and sitting under the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, and wrapped in the stars and stripes, with the Constitution in one hand and the declaration in the other, he would still be treated by the law as an escaped slave, and the federal fugitive Slave law would still lead the slave catcher to grab him up in Massachusetts and treat him as a slave. In the next several episodes, I'm going to describe to you the crisis of Southern Secession, the war, and the consequences of Lincoln's three major acts of breaking the Constitution as it was known at the time. I'll suggest you that those acts eventually had a transformative effect on the Constitution as it stood up to the moment of the Civil War. That in turn will lead me to suggest that the Compromise Constitution that existed up to the Civil War, with its character of fundamental willingness to incorporate immorality, is not the Constitution that we still have today. For this episode, though, I want to leave you with the words of Frederick Douglas, the most important abolitionist of them all. Over the course of his career, Douglas had different points of view on how the Constitution should be considered. Early on, he was committed to the view that it was fundamentally immoral. Later, in the run up to the Civil War, he shifted to the alternative view that the Constitution should be read against its own words and against its own history, as a document that could promote freedom in between. However, in eighteen fifty Douglas describe things in words that seemed to my mind entirely accurate. Here's what he said about the Compromise Constitution. Liberty and slavery opposite, as heaven and hell are both in the Constitution, Douglas said, and the oath to support the Constitution is an oath to perform that which God has made impossible. The Constitution was, Douglas concluded, at war with itself. But those words that an oath to support the Constitution is an oath to perform that which God has made impossible a self contradiction, and the support of a document at war with itself precisely captures the situation that Abraham Lincoln would find himself in just ten years after Douglas spoke those words. When Lincoln was elected president, the Southern States seceded, and he was required to consider what the oath of office to support, protect, and defend the Constitution should mean in practice to him. To hear more about that, listen to the next episode of this podcast, The Broken Constitution, coming to you in one week. If you can't wait, you can listen to the next episode a few days early on the Unknown History podcast from Quick and Dirty Tips. Find it in the show notes or your favorite podcast app, and go ahead and pre order or by The Broken Constitution from your favorite local bookstore. It's out on November second. The Broken Constitution was produced by Nathan's SEMs and Quick and Dirty Tips, a proud part of McMillan publisher's home of far Strauss and Jeru, who are publishing my book