In his latest work, David Waldstreicher produces a powerful narrative history of the role of slavery in the creation of the United States Constitution. Although the document never overtly mentions the institution, Slavery's Constitution fuses republican and progressive interpretations of the Constitution together to argue that “slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery” (17). Waldstreicher accomplishes this by starting his work in the colonial period, contending that prerevolutionary taxation policy and legal issues impacted how Americans understood slavery's role in politics. In what Waldstreicher calls “a Mansfieldian moment” (41), colonists understood that Lord Mansfield's 1772 Somerset v. Stewart decision forever intertwined slavery and politics. Mansfield forced slavery into the public debate, and colonists began to use the institution as both as an example of Great Britain's tyranny and as a rhetorical device to awaken the spirit of American liberty. Slaves understood this spirit and left their masters to join the British during the Revolution, which only helped to push slavery further into the light. It again forced the revolutionaries to “dissolve or normalize the institution in euphemisms like ‘this species of property’” (56) in order to minimize this, the most divisive issue in the political arena.

Waldstreicher next shows how the prerevolutionary issues with slavery impacted the actual Constitutional Convention. In an examination of the Convention's great compromises, he argues that slavery had become not just a practical consideration but also one that weighed heavily on the debates over federalism, representation, and taxation. James Madison himself believed that slavery, although it divided the states, needed to be addressed, as it would force the Convention to work through “the intertwined issues of nationhood, sovereignty, representation, and property in people” (76). Waldstreicher believes that the founders leveraged slavery in a way that limited government and contained disagreements about the institution itself.

The Great Compromise remained central to this containment, as the delegates had constantly sparred over slavery and apportionment of the legislature during their first 6 weeks. For Waldstreicher, representation was the most critical issue in the convention. The resulting population apportionment in the House and the three fifths compromise calmed the nerves of slaveholders, as they believed that they had secured slavery indefinitely. Slaveholders rightfully believed that their increased representation in the House allowed them greater control over taxation policy (because taxation bills needed to originate in the House), how those taxes would be spent, and how the federal government would interact with slavery. Although the law mandated a higher direct tax rate on them in exchange for this increased representation, slaveholders felt that the power to tax and the prohibition of taxes on exports, which benefited their stable crops, was well worth the increased tax.

Waldstreicher then follows the Constitution out of Philadelphia and into the states for ratification. Federalists defended slavery's presence in the Constitution as a compromise measure that placated the Low Country, while admitting the necessity of slavery in the United States. Antifederalists routinely used slavery as a way to express larger problems with the Constitution and its aristocratic and antirepublican character. Although Waldstreicher could have delved more deeply into how slavery's slow death in the North impacted the Northern understanding of slavery's place in the Constitution, especially as New York eventually gained an extra congressional seat from 1790 to 1800 because of the three fifths compromise, he again shows the centrality of slavery by suggesting that ratification issues over slavery propelled Madison to introduce the Bill of Rights to quell antifederalist complaints.

Most importantly, however, Waldstreicher concludes by arguing that the constitutional debates over slavery foreshadowed the much larger compromises that marked slavery's existence until the Civil War. To him, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed during the Constitutional Convention, implied legal protection of slavery south of the Ohio River, and “solidified the practice of deal making between increasingly self-aware sections defined by slavery” (88). Following this, the Waldstreicher contends that “Mansfieldian moments” reappeared frequently in antebellum America, as slavery and the fear of its destruction had so “carefully muddled” politics that the institution became intertwined in everything from culture, to gender roles, to the economy. By 1861, then, even the Confederate states could not conceive of giving up their “written political order,” and copied much of the United States Constitution into their own. In this way, Waldstreicher closes his book by declaring that “slavery did not itself cause the Civil War. Slavery's Constitution did” (157).

Overall, Waldstreicher crafts an easily accessible and focused narrative on the role of slavery in the Constitution. It is a useful introduction to lay audiences, and a powerful reminder for professional historians of the centrality of the Constitution in the sectional crisis, and the entanglements that slavery created in early American political culture.