The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

Historian Oakes (The Scorpion’s Sting) offers a crisp and well-argued examination of the politics and constitutional theories behind President Lincoln’s stance on slavery. He contends that abolitionists’ reading of the Constitution as an antislavery document led to the creation in the 1820s and ’30s of the “Antislavery Project,” “a series of specific policies... designed to stop and then reverse the expansion of slavery” that Lincoln and the Republican Party adopted in the 1850s. Meanwhile, proslavery advocates pointed to the fugitive slave and three-fifths clauses in the Constitution and argued that the founding fathers intended to extend rights to white men only. Oakes details Lincoln’s belief that the key to gaining widespread support for ending slavery was cutting off its expansion into new territories, and persuasively argues that though Lincoln defended Black citizenship after the Supreme Court denied it in the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, he failed to think deeply about racial discrimination. After signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln focused his energies on the passage of the 13th Amendment to establish a constitutional prohibition against slavery. This intelligent and deeply researched study adds much to the scholarly debate about how and why slavery was abolished. (Jan.)