The Constitution at War With Itself - The Bulwark - 0 views
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the original Constitution had elements that were clearly moral—the rule of law, liberty, and self-government all implied understandings of equality that were in tension with slavery.
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To play on an analogy Feldman powerfully invokes, if we think of the compromise Constitution and the amended Constitution that came out of the Civil War as akin to the Old and New Testaments, with the first being rooted in a rigid adherence to law and the second being rooted in moral understandings, there is more to the Old Testament than its insistence on law; there is an insistence, in the Prophets in particular, on the spirit and morality the law is meant to serve. To push Feldman’s analogy, the Old Testament had shoots that would grow in the New Testament: the moral and philosophical commitments of the new had roots in the old.
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The highlight of Feldman’s narrative is an exchange between Hezekiah Ford Douglas, “who had escaped enslavement at fifteen,” and William Howard Day, a free-born black man and graduate of Oberlin College. While Douglas insisted that blacks should not, in Feldman’s words, “acknowledge the legitimacy of a constitutional order based on slavery,” Day insisted that while the government was proslavery we should not confuse this “construction of the Constitution” with “the Constitution itself.” And the Constitution itself, framed to “establish justice” and to protect “liberty,” was best understood as antislavery
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