America250! Lincoln and the Declaration

Summary

Podcast Summary: History As It Happens

Episode: America250! Lincoln and the Declaration

Host: Martin Di Caro | Guest: Jim Oakes (Historian)
Date: June 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this America 250 series entry, Martin Di Caro and historian Jim Oakes dissect the enduring and deeply contested meanings of the American Revolution, with special attention to Abraham Lincoln’s use of the Declaration of Independence as a touchstone in the fight against slavery. The episode explores how both anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions claimed the mantle of the Declaration, how interpretations of America’s founding documents evolved through the 19th century, and the parallels to contemporary divisions in American society.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Contested Legacy of the Revolution

• Conflict at the Heart of American Identity
  • Oakes emphasizes that the meaning of America has always been debated, even during the Revolution and its aftermath. ("Everything you say Americans believed somebody else was saying, no, I don't." – Oakes, 04:02)
  • Politics is inherently about conflict and competing interpretations. These debates give meaning to historical events. (04:22)

2. Declaration vs. Constitution: Tensions and Interpretations

• The Declaration is almost universally interpreted as anti-slavery, but the Constitution contains key compromises protecting slavery (e.g., fugitive slave clause, three-fifths clause). (05:33)
• Oakes argues that framing the Declaration and Constitution as completely opposed or wholly harmonious is reductive; the real story lies in the evolving interpretations, especially post-1820 as debates over slavery intensify. (06:47)

3. Lincoln’s Use of the Declaration

• Lincoln saw the Declaration as central to the American idea—"the principle of fundamental human equality." (08:11)
• Lincoln and other anti-slavery thinkers did not see a sharp dichotomy between the Declaration and the Constitution; rather, they believed the former set the moral frame for the latter. (08:11–08:42)
• "What's different about Lincoln is not that he's in any way unique in his use of the Declaration. He is uniquely articulate about it...That's what the Gettysburg Address is." (Jim Oakes, 13:47)

4. Evolving Abolitionist Thought

• The Garrisonians (radical abolitionists) originally held views much closer to Lincoln’s "liberty document" interpretation but shifted in the 1850s to condemning the Constitution as a pro-slavery compact (Burning the Constitution, 1854). (10:02–10:27)
• The anti-slavery movement’s genius was translating sentiment into effective political action—the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln’s election. (39:50)

5. Slavery, the Founders’ Intentions, and Historical Change

• Lincoln believed the founders intended slavery’s gradual demise, pointing to early bans and limits (e.g., the Northwest Ordinance, limits on the slave trade). (16:38)
• Oakes: "No one could have imagined...the cotton explosion that happened that sort of brought slavery back to life." (17:53)
• The very fact of debate over slavery at the Constitutional Convention signaled an emerging anti-slavery sentiment that did not exist in earlier generations. (18:40)

6. Southern & Secessionist Interpretations of the Declaration

• Pro-slavery thinkers, especially secessionists, refashion the Declaration—claiming the right to "alter or abolish" government as a states’ right. (30:47)
• "Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas said all white men are created equal. They simply racialized it. And a lot of Southerners did the same thing." (Jim Oakes, 30:57)
• Jefferson Davis and others extended the logic: "All that’s created equal in the Declaration...are the states themselves." (31:15)
• The right of revolution was central to the Confederates’ justification for secession, but, as Oakes clarifies, you still have to win your revolution. (37:11)

7. The Legal and Moral Debate Over Slavery

• The notion that "human beings can't be property" is both a moral and constitutional argument (as Sean Wilentz’s No Property in Man shows). (33:40)
• The 18th-century moral revolution against slavery was unprecedented and would become the bedrock for future reform and civil rights movements. (35:15 / 14:30)
• "Every progressive movement from that time on—women’s movement, gay rights movement, civil rights movement—ground themselves in that particular phrase [‘all men are created equal’]." (Jim Oakes, 14:30)

8. Complexity of the Constitution’s Compromises

• The Constitution was a set of compromises between slavery and anti-slavery, but Oakes warns against equating compromise with capitulation. (24:56)
• Both the anti-slavery and pro-slavery interpretations became more intense in response to each other as the 19th century unfolded. (25:30–27:53)

9. The Political Nature of Change

• Abolition wasn't inevitable; it resulted from intense conflict, effective politics, and changing power dynamics (e.g., population, economics, north v. south). (39:50)
• "What it took was a combination of superior northern economic development… and the genius of the Republican party… to translate that sense of superiority… into a viable political project that threatened the south…" (Jim Oakes, 39:50)

10. Understanding vs. Vindicating the Past

• Oakes underscores that the historian’s job is not to determine who was "right," but to understand what happened and why, and how political conflict produces real change. (38:53)
• The meaning of the Union and of American identity has always been in flux—a fact that continues into the present day as America approaches its 250th anniversary. (43:13)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On American conflict:
  "If you take those conflicts out of the past, the past doesn't make much sense."
  — Jim Oakes (04:02)

• On Lincoln’s rhetoric:
  "What's different about Lincoln is not that he's in any way unique in his use of the Declaration. He is uniquely articulate about it."
  — Jim Oakes (13:47)

• On the perpetual relevance of the Declaration:
  "Without it, it's hard to imagine the history of American social movements and reform movements absent that premise."
  — Jim Oakes (14:30)

• On anti-slavery politics:
  "How do you translate that basic understanding that there’s something wrong about slavery into a viable political project that ends up putting the first major anti-slavery party in control of the federal government... It’s an extraordinary achievement."
  — Jim Oakes (39:50)

• On the historian’s role:
  "The job of the historian is to understand why things happen when they did, not who was right or wrong."
  — Martin Di Caro (38:53)

• On the difficulty of change:
  "A century has passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed and he is not fully freed tonight. ... Emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. … The time for justice has now come, and I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come."
  — MLK Jr. (45:10)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:27 – Introduction of Jim Oakes; importance of discussing contested, enduring meanings of the Revolution
• 05:19 – Declaration vs. Constitution: tensions and interpretations
• 08:11 – Lincoln’s interpretation: Declaration and Constitution as inseparable
• 10:02 – Garrisonians’ changing views on the Constitution
• 13:47 – Lincoln's rhetorical power with the Declaration, Gettysburg Address context
• 16:38 – Lincoln’s take on the Founders' intentions and historical change
• 18:40 – Emergence of anti-slavery politics after the Revolution
• 20:32 – Dred Scott, Taney, and Lincoln’s response
• 24:56 – The nature of Constitutional compromises on slavery
• 30:47 – Secessionists’ use of the Declaration to defend slavery and secession
• 33:40 – “No Property in Man”: moral and legal arguments on human property
• 39:50 – Political abolitionism and the rise of the Republican Party
• 43:13 – Union, slavery, and the meaning of American identity at America 250
• 45:10 – MLK Jr. on the unfulfilled promise of the Declaration and Emancipation

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Tone & Language

• The episode maintains an analytical yet accessible tone, with Di Caro probing and Oakes offering nuanced, detail-rich answers.
• Both host and guest strive to connect historical debates to present-day issues, without simplistic analogies.
• Oakes consistently encourages a view of history that highlights contradiction, the coexistence of conflicting narratives, and the political processes that translate values into action.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a rich, thought-provoking conversation about how Americans from Lincoln to the present have wrestled over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Listeners come away with a deeper appreciation for the persistent, unresolved debates at the heart of American identity—debates that have been, and continue to be, fundamental to the struggle for equality and justice.

Transcript

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[Host (History as It Happens)]

business credit history as it happens, and it's a difficult time for our country, 1857 Chief Justice Roger Taney has handed down his infamous ruling in the Dred Scott case, saying black people, enslaved or free, were never and could never be American citizens. In his book the Radical and the Republican, historian Jim Oakes writes about Abraham Lincoln's response to the Dred Scott ruling. The central idea of the American republic, wrote Lincoln, from its founding until recently, had been the equality of men, and with it the idea that slavery was wrong. But since 1854, since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, politicians and editors have been cutting that central idea down to size, narrowing its meaning, limiting its scope. Some were now saying that the only equality that mattered was the equality of states rather than of men. The Supreme Court now said the Declaration of Independence meant only that all white men were created equal. Pro slavery writers went so far as to claim that slavery, rather than being an abstract evil, was a positive good. In the old days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, said Lincoln, and thought to include all. But now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered at, and construed and hawked at, and torn till if its framers could rise from their graves and they cannot at all recognize it. This is the latest installment in my America 250 series as our country prepares to celebrate its semi quincentennial in a time when many Americans are comparing our current divisions in the Age of Trump to Those of the 1850s, when the conflict over slavery led to a civil war a few years later. Now, I don't think that's the case, but it is true that Americans have always argued over what it means to be an American. Rights for whom? Freedom for whom? What was the meaning of the American Revolution? Its purpose? As we're going to discuss in this episode, Abraham Lincoln himself reached back to 1776 to make his case against slavery. So did many secessionists, who also cited that same document, the Declaration of Independence, to justify their pro slavery revolution. Jim Oakes, welcome back to the show.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Good to be here as usual.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Maybe an unexpected place for you to return. America 250, 1776. Your work is more in the 19th century, although you're an origins guy. All historians are the origins of the anti slavery movement. We can knock that back to 1776. I'm doing this series and it's very easy to focus only on the revolution itself. As a historian, don't you think think it's more important or as important to talk about the enduring and contested meanings of the American Revolution?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Absolutely. The tendency to sort of say Americans felt this way, Americans did this, American, and not realize that everything you say Americans believed somebody else was saying, no, I don't. And usually they're saying, I believe this because somebody is saying they believe something different. If you take those conflicts out of the past, the past doesn't make much sense.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Politics is about conflict. Not necessarily bloody conflict, but conflict. Right. Competing interpretations. I mean, Even in the 1790s, Republicans and Federalists were accusing each other of betraying the legacy of the revolution. And if the other side won the country basically as we know it, destroyed the republic as we know it. This is the 1790s, right before they

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

had any conception of legitimate opposition. Which is weird because in a bizarre way, we're back to that. We're back to the idea that opposition is illegitimate. It's strange. It's a strange feeling. But that's neither here nor there. Let me just say one thing. The book I'm just finishing actually begins in the 18th century and the revolution is chapter two. I do go back. There is an important part of the history of the Civil War and of the anti slavery movement that doesn't make sense if you don't go all the way back to the 18th century.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

So let's go back then to the 18th century. And the book you're referring to will be your next book about the origins of the Civil War. Is there a tension between the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution in this context?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

I suppose in the sense that the Declaration of Independence doesn't have much in it that could be interpreted as pro slavery, whereas the Constitution does have certain things in it that protect slavery. In that sense, it's different. You know, the Declaration of Independence did a lot of things. It repudiated monarchy and the Constitution enshrined that repudiation as fundamental to the American state. Right. Those kinds of things. There's a case to be made for the Constitution as the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence. But there's a case, if you want to make it, for the Declaration and the Constitution as at odds with one another. I tend to think that way of framing the debate isn't particularly helpful. So this is what the Declaration of Independence did and said. And it took on a lot more significance, I would think, after 1820, because that's when it starts to become contested, as you say. That's when anti slavery people were saying, this is what the Declaration says. And the pro slavery people are beginning to respond by saying that's not what the Founding was all about. You know, you start to get very, very divergent interpretations of what the Declaration of Independence means based on the conflict over slavery.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

In your book, the Radical and the Republican, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Anti Slavery Politics, you note that Lincoln, in his view, it was the 1850s when the consensus around what the Declaration of Independence meant started to change. In other words, the Southerners said, no, it doesn't apply to everybody.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right. I don't think he's right about that. I think that was a point he was making for political reasons. I mean, it was, it was a polemical point. I suppose in his own mind, you know, he was born in Kentucky. Henry Clay is a big major figure in the Whig Party that he became a part of Kentucky had debates over slavery. Right. Very late in the game. I think he had a sense that there were more possibilities before 1850 than there were after 1850. On the other hand, I don't think it's accurate to say that people weren't restricting the meaning of the Declaration of independence before the 1850s. They were restricting the meaning way earlier than that.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

So Lincoln grounded his anti slavery views in an anti slavery interpretation of the Constitution. Correct. But he also anchored his antislavery views, maybe even more so. And the Declaration of Independence, he didn't

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

see the two as different. He thought of the. I can't remember whether I get the frame of the picture right when I say this, but he said at one point they thought of the Declaration as the frame and the Constitution as the picture or vice versa. But he saw them as of a piece. Right. And in fact, the Republican party platforms of 56, 1856 and 1860 say that the principle of fundamental human equality is embodied in the Constitution. That's contested by historians now, but historians. There's a case to be made for that, too.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Historians who take on the Garrisonian interpretation of the Constitution as a person.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yeah, that is. That has been the orthodoxy. It's changing. Just before we came on, I wrote a blurb for a second major book that's coming out on Frederick Douglass's interpretation of the Constitution as an abolitionist document. I don't agree with Douglass either, but he's closer to the truth than the Garrisonians. The Garrisonians became increasingly obsessive about the Constitution Constitution over time because they weren't that way in 1833 when they founded the American Anti Slavery Society. And Garrison wrote this charter that we all know as the Declaration of Sentiments. It has the Lincolnian interpretation of the Constitution in it.

[Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpt)]

Right.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

It says, congress can't abolish slavery in a state where it exists. We all know that. But it can do these things constitutionally. It can abolish slavery in Washington, D.C. it can ban slavery from the territory. It can regulate the interstate slave trade. It can guarantee the due process rights of accused fugitives. It's much closer to Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s than Garrison was by the 1850s. And yet that Garrisonian interpretation that ended up rendering him largely irrelevant to the antislavery movement by the 1850s has been the orthodoxy among historians for almost the entirety of my professional life. It's breaking, but it's the orthodoxy.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I remember years ago on this show discussing with you Henry Mayer's terrific biography of Garrison. But, yeah, there are problems with it. You know, we just can't take what the principle of the story says to be the truth, the unvarnished truth. Whether it's Douglass or Garrison, it's a powerful image. He burns a facsimile of the Constitution and says, damn this document. Look what it did. It gave us slavery forever, and we can't get rid of it.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

That's 1854. That's 21 years after he had produced the founding charter of the radical abolitionist movement. That said something completely different.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

That's the important thing here. Conflict in Chronology, Nothing just is frozen in time. Okay, Constitution is ratified in the 1780s and that's it. From the very beginning. You have people taking different parts of it or pointing to different parts of it and saying, well no, actually Congress can ban slavery from the territories. What's funny about the Constitution, maybe funny is not right way of putting it, but you get my point. Its most powerful protection of slavery, the so called federal consensus is not mentioned in it. Right?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

No. Everybody agrees that slavery is a state issue. It's only states create slavery. The federal government doesn't create it, only the states do. And the federal government does not have the power to either abolish or create it in a state.

[Civil Rights Speaker (Possibly Martin Luther King Jr.)]

Right.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

And that in a certain sense limits the scope of anti slavery politics. Like you can't have an anti slavery politics that says once we get control of Congress, Congress can abolish slavery in the states. That never happens because everybody agrees that Congress doesn't have that power. On the other hand, it also says the flip side of that is Congress can't be going around creating slavery and forcing slave. So like the Fugitive Slave Law is illegitimate because it's forcing northern states to participate in and enforce the slave laws of the South. Right. You can't do that. Congress did not have the power to create slavery in Washington D.C. congress did not have the power to allow slavery into the territories. So the flip side of the federal consensus that says Congress can't abolish slavery in the state is that Congress can't create slavery anywhere within its jurisdiction. It's an important part of antislavery politics. Right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

So this is how I interpret Lincoln in the 1850s and afterward. If the Constitution is not a liberty document or if it doesn't have anti slavery elements in it, then what the hell was the purpose of the American Revolution? What does the Declaration of Independence actually mean? Does the Constitution then cancel the Declaration? Now the Declaration of Independence is not our governing document. But that's where I see Lincoln anchoring more and more as he gets older in the 1850s, anchoring his anti slavery plank in the Declaration itself.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

You want to take that.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

He's not alone in that. That's also in that. You know, the abolitionists were doing that again from the beginning. It's in that Declaration of sentiments in 1833. They view Christianity as and the Declaration of Independence as the moral basis of anti slavery politics of anti slavery agitation. And Lincoln agrees with that. I mean, he's not as Christian in his orientation, but it's hard to find an anti slavery Politician who doesn't take the Declaration of Independence, the principle of fundamental human equality, as sort of the baseline premise of their anti slavery politics. What's different about Lincoln is not that he's in any way unique in his use of the Declaration. He is uniquely articulate about it. Right. That's what the Gettysburg Address is. Right. It's a brilliant, articulate, evocative restatement of the principle of fundamental human equality as the basis of American life, of American politics, of American society.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Probably worth.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

We've lost that. We've lost that.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I agree. The bonds of our republic are fraying. I'll also note though, when the Declaration itself was written, probably its authors believe that they are writing for posterity, writing for all time. But it wasn't just an abstraction. Right. They actually had an indictment. So everyone, you know, just remembers the first few sentences. The 25 count or whatever it was. Indictment of King George III, which a lot of it was inaccurate. As much as I love Thomas Jefferson, you know, give or take, some of those weren't.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right, Right, right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Ex post facto justifications for a revolution that was underway, but whatever.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I'm not defending King George iii. It served a particular purpose at that time. It was a public relations purpose. Yeah.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

It's profoundly important that that statement was made that that is the founding document. Every progressive movement from that time on, women's movement, gay rights movement, civil rights movement, ground themselves in that particular phrase. And it's without it. Without it, it's hard to imagine the history of American social movements and reform movements absent that premise. If you remember the famous Declaration of Sentiments that the women and Seneca Falls. Right. We hold these truths to be seldom, that all men and women are created equal. Martin Luther King's famous, you know, I have a dream speech, he quotes it directly. It's hard to imagine American political life without that premise.

[Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpt)]

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

And the contestations of that premise more

[Host (History as It Happens)]

so than the Constitution itself. So I want to discuss how the Confederates also took inspiration at some point, or the secessionists, I should say, took inspiration from the Declaration to stand that document on its head. To defend slavery. But I want to stay with Lincoln here talking about Lincoln and how he elevated the Declaration of Independence in his anti slavery arguments. What did Lincoln think of the Founding fathers and their relationship to slavery? Did he believe that they, meaning the Founders, had intended slavery to go away at some point? Or it was just an unfortunate. Okay, I'll let you.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yeah, that's what he believed. He believed that the founders overwhelmingly opposed slavery. And he had certain. He went back in certain empirical ways. Like look at the way they voted on the ban on slavery in the Northwest territories. They all agreed, why ban slavery in the Northwest territories? You know, unless you're opposed to slavery, why put into the Constitution a deadline for the closing down of the Atlantic slave trade and a ban on importing slaves? So he looked at those things and he said, you know, their intention was to ultimately have a nation in which slavery goes away. Nobody could have imagined, nobody at the time, certainly not in 1776 and not even in 1787. No one could have imagined the cot explosion that happened that sort of brought slavery back to life. It's possible that those reactionaries from South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention had an inkling that cotton was, might be the future. It's possible. You know, the cotton gin is 1793. You can't grow cotton inland and that's what saves slavery. It's not hard for them to come into the Constitutional Convention and see that in the very recent past, in the past few years, Pennsylvania abolished slavery. Rhode island abolished slavery. Massachusetts abolished slavery. Both houses of the New York legislature passed laws abolishing slavery. Vermont was abolishing slavery. So they saw this happening and they said this is the future. This is the future in which every state gradually comes to the conclusion that slavery isn't worth it, it's immoral, it's uneconomical, whatever, it's sociologically bad. It's, you know, it's not hard for them to imagine that. And you know, you look back and you say, well, they certainly were naive, but that's, you know.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Sure.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

You know, that assumes they could predict the cotton explosion and they couldn't.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

There's this idea out there that we were created as a slaveholders republic, period, end of story. And that's it. Whereas the reality is the anti slavery movement was born in our country, manifesting in the ending of slavery in the northern states.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yeah, A lot of the northern states were attempting, even the southern states, Virginia were attempting to ban the importation of slaves even before 1776. Right. And those laws kept getting overruled by the Crown and the imperial officials in London, stuff like that. And it wasn't too long after that that you started getting, you know, it's 1780, 1780, Pennsylvania passes an abolition statute repealing all the slave codes at the same time. You know, and so it's. Yeah, it's before Yorktown. And then you go into the Constitutional Convention and everybody agrees that there's a fight over slavery. Several different fights over slavery. Well, there couldn't have been a fight over slavery 15 years earlier. That just couldn't. Because every colony had slavery. Every colony that was signed onto the Declaration of Independence became a slave state, things like that. Now, there were debates right from the start over it, but the fact that they're fighting over Slavery in 1787 at the Constitution Convention is in and of itself a profoundly important indication of something that's happening that wouldn't have happened a generation earlier.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Speaking of contested meanings of the American Revolution as I do this series, hoping to do more and more of These episodes as July 4th approaches contested, enduring meanings. What did it mean to be an American? What did the Revolution produce? What kind of country were we supposed to be? Dred Scott, not the individual referring to the Supreme Court ruling. You take this up in your book. Chief Justice Taney argued the condition of African Americans was actually worse in the revolutionary period and had been getting better. And he had a much different interpretation of the Revolution and the Declaration than Lincoln did.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Oh, Lincoln's response to that is one of the most powerful things he ever wrote. It's about how it looks to be like exactly the opposite. That it's gotten worse and worse and worse. That every attempt to press against slavery is met with, you know, an almost obsessive need to batten the hatches down and, you know, tighten the chains, manacle them further, hide them away. It's exactly the opposite. For him, the history of the United States is exactly the opposite of what Taney. It's a repudiation of a founding era in which the reason we have free blacks in the north quarter of a million of them by 1860 is because all those states abolished slavery. There is this paradoxical aspect of the 1850s that Lincoln is has to confront, which is that the more powerful and the more successful and the more appealing anti slavery politics is to northerners, which it is in the 1850s, the more vulgar and demagogic the racism is. So those two things are happening at the same time. The racism is elevated because the anti slavery politics is elevated. So again, if you choose to erase the conflict. You could say it got worse and worse because they were more racist in the 1850s than they had ever been. You could say that. But the reason the racism is so much more extreme in the 1850s is because the anti slavery was so much more powerful in the 1850s. That's the response. That's Taney's response. That's Alexander Stevens response. It's like all of your anti slavery politics is based on the naive assumption that blacks and whites are equal. The false premise of all antislavery politics for these people.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, get early access and enjoy all of our bonus content or go to history as it happens.com. Now you can compare that to any social justice cause today. As the members of a movement get closer and closer to achieving their aims, equal rights, liberation, whatever it is, the opposing side becomes more and more vehement in their denunciations.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

The world's going to come to an end. If you let gay people get married or women have abortions or whatever it is, it becomes apocalyptic, which is what happened in the 1850s. I want to go back to the question about Lincoln's view of the founding and the Constitution because it was pretty nuanced. He thought, like most Republicans, that in the Constitution freedom is the rule and slavery is the exception. But there is an exception. Those exceptions are there. The three fifths clause. He considered, you know, an insulting exception that they had to put in if they were going to have a union. He didn't like the fugitive slave clause, you know, those kinds of things. But he accepted them and accepted that the Founders did that in order to create the Union because if they didn't make those concessions, there wouldn't have been a union. At the same time, the Founders set it up so that we'd withdraw from the slave trade. They empowered Congress to ban slavery from the territories. Right. This is one of the things I ask people when I hear the argument this Constitution is a pro slavery document. Does the Constitution empower Congress to ban slavery from the territories? And the answer is yes, it's incontestable. Right. The next question is, try to imagine US history from 1790 to 1860 without that, without that power, there's no Missouri crisis, there's no Texas annexation crisis, there's no Mexican War crisis. There's no compromise of 1850, there's no Kansas, Nebraska. Virtually the whole of American history changes if you take that out of the Constitution.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Sure. And the Slavocracy believed they needed to expand to survive. That slavery needed expansion and one way to eventually get rid of slavery was to contain it. So yeah, if you just simply dismiss the Constitution as a pro slavery document or basically our country is stuck with slavery forever, you're basically dismissing politics and, and, and the fact the Constitution can be amended and the Civil War created that opportunity. But we've discussed on a past episode how long it may have taken to just have slavery go out, you know, become extinct naturally, so to speak. Although in the realm of politics, nothing is really natural. Just doesn't happen by accident.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

It's a problem when we talk about the Constitution as a set of compromises about slavery. It is, but compromise is a two way street. When a lot of people say the Constitution compromises with slavery, they mean the Constitution is abject capitulation to slavery. The actual compromising disappears, you know, and they equate compromise with capitulation. The anti slavery elements of the Constitution, especially the ones that become an important part of the anti slavery interpretation of the Constitution, are rendered irrelevant.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

The pro slavery constitutionalists, the really aggressive ones, that comes later, that's not there at the beginning.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yes, there were attempts. When Louisiana came in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, there were attempts in Congress, successful for a short period of time, to prevent slavery from slaves from being imported into Louisiana. This is before the ban on importation. Right. And in those debates in Congress, the Southerners all accepted the Congress had the power to ban slavery from Louisiana territory, but that it was imprudent for it to do so. You know, it wouldn't work. In a sense they were right because if Congress tried to do that, Louisiana would have just seceded right away. It would never have come into the union. Nevertheless, by 1820 that changes. And Southerners, in response to the attempt to restrict slavery in Missouri, you start seeing a more extreme pro slavery interpretation of the Constitution that says Congress does not in fact have the power to ban slavery from those territories that the Northwest Territory only applied to the territories that the United States owned at the time. Every new additional piece, that capacity to ban slavery is irrelevant. It doesn't exist. Right. So you get an increasingly extreme pro slavery interpretation in response to the emergence of increasingly militant anti slavery attempts to restrict. Right. It's the pro slavery interpretation in a sense that gets more and more extreme. Not the anti slavery one the opponents of slavery believe. From 1784 on, virtually every northern state voted for Jefferson's ban on slavery in the territories. Everybody agreed on banning slavery from the territories in the 1780s. And that's the position that Lincoln and the Republicans take in 1860. It doesn't really change. Right. What changes is the pro slavery position that becomes more extreme. And that's what Lincoln and Republicans are responding to when he says things like, nobody would have said this 20 years ago. He's responding to the increasingly radical tenor of pro slavery thought.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

That is interesting because there are still people around in 1820 who remember the Constitutional Convention who were there at it or were involved in the political process. And it's always interesting to consult how their views changed over time and what they wanted to do. I know that Jefferson, who was a slave owner himself, he was convulsing over the Missouri Compromise.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yeah, they all were. But Monroe took a whole of his Cabinet. Right. And they all agreed, including Calhoun, that Congress did in fact have the right to ban slavery from Missouri, but that it would be imprudent. But down in Congress you're starting to hear much more extreme interpretations. And Calhoun himself would become, you know, the voice of pro slavery extremism in the 1830s and 40s.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

If you can recruit John C. Calhoun to an anti slavery argument, you know, can ban in the Territory.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Oh, I don't think he's anti slavery in any meaningful sense. I just mean that they didn't deny that Congress had the power to ban slavery from the territory. They just thought it was a terrible idea.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Oh, so being sarcastic there, you know, not to digress. John C. Calhoun is the answer to a great trivia question before Spiro Agnew, who is the only other vice president to quit.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah, I guess so.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Yeah. It was Calhoun under Andrew Jackson.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

They didn't see eye to eye about the tariffs. Okay, so.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Well, that's part of his. We were talking before the broadcast about Bill Freeling's books on secession, but his first book on the. On this crisis, the South Carolina Crisis in Jackson, he makes a good case that that's a turning point for people like Calhoun.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Sure. The nullification crisis about the tariff. Because if we allow the this. Well, then they make home for slavery next.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yes. And they say that that was the great contribution of that first book.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I do have this book here, his second volume, in the Road to Disunion. Because I'm going to return now to our focus on Lincoln, the Declaration and how the other side used the Declaration, co opted it to defend what they were doing there to defend slavery. So when I read William Freeling's book, I don't know, 15 years ago or more, I was surprised that in addition to claiming the Constitution defended Slavery. The Bible defended slavery. Legal arguments could be made to defend slavery. In addition to all that, the secessionists also used the Declaration of Independence to defend slavery, just as Lincoln was using it to denounce slavery and saying, this is not the country we can have. We, you know, we are a country based on fundamental human equality. So Freeling says here, no believer in Republicanism can renounce all claims that a people have a natural right to switch their consent to be governed. And that goes to the heart of the secessionists. You know, I think it's a fallacious argument, but that was their argument. We are changing our consent to be governed. The Union or whoever. The anti slavery forces have violated the compact. The states created the country. The states agreed that this would not happen. You would not interfere with slavery. You're going to interfere with slavery. So now we're going to revolt. We have the right to revolt. We have the right to revolt. Of course.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

The right of revolution. The right of revolution.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

They denied that right to slaves. So there are lots of holes in their argument. So why don't you pick it up? I'll stop talking too. Why don't you pick it up for me?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

That was pretty easy for them to pick up on the right of revolution. And Lincoln's position was you do have the right to secede, but you have to come to Congress and ask if you'll be allowed to secede because once you're in, Congress has to. Right? So he didn't deny that you could get out of the Union. He denied that you could do it unilaterally. The more important thing is how they dealt with the fundamental human equality question. And northern Democrats responded. Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas said all white men are created equal. They simply racialized it. And a lot of Southerners did the same thing. But Jefferson Davis's argument meant that all states were created equal. And it's the logical extension of the state rights argument. Right. All that's created equal in the Declaration of Independence are the states themselves. And we are equally entitled to all the rights that every other state is entitled to. And the right we have is to enslave black people. And you can't deny us that right. Carry our slaves into the common territories of the United States. The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution acknowledges that slaves are property. And we have a right to claim our property anywhere in the United States, you know, and to go into free states and run through the streets and pick up black people if that's what we want to do. Those are conflicting interpretations of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. My emphasis always on these conflicting interpretations. I do think the anti slavery argument was the better argument. Right. We know from Sean Bellentz's work and others that they tried to put a property right into the Constitution. And could. We know that they tried to make the states the original version of the Fugitive Slave clause, required the states to enforce it. And then Roger Sherman and James Wilson said no way, and they took that out. So there's no enforcement clause because of that. We know that. So the Southern argument that it's a property right and that the federal government is obligated to enforce it in the states is a weaker argument than the anti slavery argument that Lincoln and the Republicans were putting Forward in the 1850s. I think their position on slavery in the territories hadn't fundamentally changed since the 1780s, nor had their position on fugitive slaves fundamentally changed since the 1780s. The things that were different by the 1850s were the increased power that the north had to be able to press its views against an increasingly reactionary South, a pro slavery south, and also pushing for things that weren't there in the 1780s and 90s, like. Like regulating the domestic slave trade, Things like that. But the two big issues that caused the Civil War that Lincol repeatedly mentioned over the course of the 1850s was the slavery in the territories and the fugitive slave issue. And those were not fundamentally different.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

There's the argument that human beings can't be property. And that is not just a moral argument, as Sean Wilentz makes clear in his book no Property in Man, it's a constitutional argument.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yes. That takes us into the broader intellectual origins of antislavery thought. Because strictly speaking, there's no reason why a human being can't be property. Then human beings were property forever for thousands and thousands of years, all over the place. Abolitionist morality turns that upside down and says that's an oxymoron. Human property is an abomination. Right. We all accept that. It's a novel thing to believe. It's not something most people ever believed. We think it's inconceivable that a human being could be property. But most of the time, throughout most of human history, there was nothing inconceivable about that. There's different kinds of property, and you treat different kinds of property differently. You don't treat a cow the way you treat an ice cream cone. They're both your property. But you know, you devour one and you do something else with the other. And human property is treated different from other forms of property, but it's property in that sense. The Southerners were right that something had changed fundamentally ideologically, but it had changed back in the 18th century. Had. You know, this was David Brian Davis's most profound contribution to the study of global slavery, that some profound moral revolution had taken place in the 18th century that led large numbers of people to believe for the first time that slavery was so immoral that it had to be abolished.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Your comment there reminds me of a scene from a great, great movie, Billy Bud with Peter Ustinov.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Oh boy. It's been years since I've seen When

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Ustinov and his fellow officers are debating privately whether Bud has to be hanged for striking a superior officer and killing him. Even though it was accidental. One of the dissenters says about this conflict between morality and the law, he says wasn't one created or designed to serve the other? The legalisms defending slavery. Well, what are you talking about here? Human property. And what I found fascinating about Freeland things Work was that the secessionists themselves, like politicians today, they realized that legalisms were simply boring people. People didn't understand these state rights theories about why our state can leave the Union and why you can't touch our peculiar institution, etc. Etc. I'll just share a paragraph here from Freeling's book. Calhoun, having died a decade before disunion, could only be partly the father of secession theory. His bloodless legalisms cannot wholly overcome the disunity of the South. Daniel Webster's unionist argument that the nation came before the states could be a convincing answer. Worse, tired legalism's dulled attention. Therefore, disunionists needed instead an inspiring justification of a state's holy right to secede. One that aroused cheers even among anti secessionists in the tradition of 1776, in the White people of any single state's natural right to withdraw consent to be governed, disunionists found their stirring states rights dogma. Secession is pretty hard to comprehend, wrote a young Virginian. But we all know the meaning of revolution, right?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right. You know, the fly in that ointment is that when Americans declared that in 1776 they had to beat the British in a long protracted war in order to sustain that argument, you know, the Southerners were going to have to do the same thing. You think you can leave, okay, win the war, beat us out. And they failed. They failed. You can claim that right, but you have to win the right. The great achievement, the great significance of that book and of Freeling's work is that he has a divided South, Yes. Profoundly divided. We know that, you know, four slave states failed to join the Confederacy. The upper south wasn't as hot about it as the Lower south was. And a lot of what happens during the Civil War is contingent on that initial failure to unify all the Southerners. I think Lincoln and the Republicans were initially naive about how strong that anti Confederate feeling was, or at least how strong the hostility to the slave owning class might be in the South. But it still remained the case that the Confederates believed that the slave states belonged naturally to the Confederacy. And they tried to get Missouri into the Union, they tried to get Kentucky into the Union, but the Southern states just were not sufficiently those upper south states, whether because the slaveholders weren't strong enough or because the slaveholders in those states knew that in any war all the armies would come marching through their states first. Stuff like that. You know, there's lots of reasons why, but they failed. And it is a gigantic failure on their part that they couldn't unify in the way that the Northerners did.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

So last thing here, Jim. I don't spend too much time on my show trying to figure out, you know, who had it right, who was right about these different interpretations, who was right in the conflict. Or maybe I spend more time on that than I'm willing to give myself credit for at the moment. But really that's something you've taught me. The job of a historian. I'm not a historian. You are. Is to understand why things happen when they did not. You know, who was right or wrong or why didn't this happen sooner than it did? You know, how could something like the abolition of slavery happen at all? But you know, there is something to be said about who had these arguments right. Because as we've been discussing, I mean Frederick Douglass's, you know, liberty document had holes in it and Lincoln's interpretation had holes in it. I think the Southerners interpretation of the Declaration of Independence was garbage. And I don't agree with the argument that the Constitution was a pro slavery argument all the way. The point here is this was played out in the realm of politics.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yes. And this is the great achievement of the abolitionist movement, political abolitionists and finally the Republican party is that it could translate a sentiment against slavery that virtually all the vast majority of northerners shared. They were proud of the fact that their states had abolished slavery. Right, but how do you translate. And you know, they don't think slavery is a good idea, but how do you translate that basic understanding that there's something wrong about slavery into a viable political project that ends up putting the first major antislavery party in control of the federal government in 1860, certainly in control of Congress, of the presidency, and with the withdrawal of the southern states in control of both houses of Congress. It's an extraordinary achievement. It's not that they were right and the southerners were wrong, although I do think they were right and they got it right and the Southerners didn't. But it's more that what it took was a combination of superior northern economic development. The vast majority of immigrants were coming into the north. The northern economy was doing so much better than the southern economy economy. Not that the slave economy was failing or anything like that, anything close to that. It's that this northern economy was clearly more dynamic. It was clear the population was clearly soaring past and the southerners could see that. They saw the handwriting on the wall and what the genius of the Republican party and of all the anti slavery movement was to translate that sense of the superiority of northern free labor society into a viable political project that threatened the south to the point where with the election of an anti slavery president, they simply decided to break up the union.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

Yeah. Another way of looking at it is to go back in time and pick any point where the prevailing argument or the side that had the most votes, then you automatically conclude that they had the better argument and they were in the right. That's not how politics is because we know for a very long lifetime, until 1865 and the 13th amendment, I said a very long lifetime, that's about 80 years. So if you were born during the revolution, you may have been old enough to remember the abolition of slavery. I mean, what happened during that lifetime?

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right. Here's another. It relates to the point you were making about different interpretations in conflict. Right. So one of the ways in which historians get around the fact that the north, what the north was up to is by saying they were fighting for the Union, not for slavery. What's at stake in 1860, in the 1850s through the Civil War, is what kind of union it was going to be. I mean, Jefferson Davis was in a way a unionist. He didn't think secession was necessary, just let slavery go into the territories like it's supposed to. You know, let us get our fugitive slaves back and we won't secede because we're nationalists too. Right. He's a unionist. Stephen Douglas is a unionist. He's a pro slavery. Well, he's not pro slavery, sort of pro slavery. He's a unionist who doesn't care about slavery. And the issue for the Republicans was that their conception of the union was this was a union created by the founders who intended there to ultimately be no slavery. So the attempt to separate the war for the union from a war about slavery doesn't make any sense. Because what was at stake was what kind of union we were going to

[Host (History as It Happens)]

have and what kind of country are we today? Last thing, I promise this is the last thing. We're about to celebrate America 250. I can already see roughly half the country saying to hell with it all. And then on the other side, the triumphalists offering a candy coated version of the American past.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Right.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I'm going to find a way to celebrate America 250. Maybe somewhere in the sane middle.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

I remember saying this to one of my, a friend of mine who's a very distinguished early American historian and saying he was going on about the Constitution as, you know, pro slavery and stuff like that and the revolution, blah blah, blah. I said, you know, leave all that slavery stuff aside. Don't you think it's good that we don't have a monarchy? Don't you think it was a good thing that the Constitution says there can be no noble privileges and nobody can have aristocratic titles or banned? I think it was a good thing that when the Constitution was sent to the states, you know, all the states set up ratifying conventions in which all of the property qualifications for voting were eliminated. Everybody, every male, could vote on whether to have that Constitution or not. It's a good thing. That's a very important precedent that got set. The Constitution has a lot of problems, a whole lot of problems and that we're living with today. But the revolution did some things that we don't want to go back on. And one of the things it did was set up a conflict of slavery over slavery that wouldn't have existed without the revolution and turned a sociological difference, a socioeconomic difference between the north and the south into a political difference between the north and the South.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

And in that respect, Lincoln was right.

[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Yes, yes. I just said I think that cliche that Republicans, including Lincoln used to. In the Constitution, freedom is the rule, slavery is the exception. That's a lot more nuanced than a lot of people today are when they talk about the Constitution.

[Civil Rights Speaker (Possibly Martin Luther King Jr.)]

I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed and he is not fully freed tonight. It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great president of another party signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. A century has passed, more than a hundred years since equality was promised, and yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise, and the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come, and I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll return to the question of what was or what is a Cold War liberal? To what extent can we reach back and point to the enduring influence of foreign policymakers a century ago? That is next, as we report History as it Happens. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to substack and search for History As It Happens.

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[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

as fast as I could after Jesse called for help. It's been too long, cowboy.

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[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Lily pal, what are you, some sort of old man toy? She thinks you're old because you're bald. Woody from Disney and Pixar Toys are for play. Tech is for everything.

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It's toys versus tech.

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[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

Oh, it's happening.

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[Jim Oakes (Historian Guest)]

I want to talk to you. Device along toys.

[Host (History as It Happens)]

I responded. I have plastic fingers.

[Commercial Voice]

Disney Pixar's Toy Story 5. Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested only in theaters June 19. Tickets available now.