4 - The Spirit of 1787

Summary

Chapter 4 details how antebellum Americans followed the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution. Conservative Northerners embodied the “spirit of 1787,” aiding the Southern minority on matters relating to slavery when the explicit provisions of the Constitution were not sufficient. These conservative Northerners did their constitutional duty by providing sectional balance to proslavery presidential tickets, thereby giving the appearance that the South did not dominate the executive branch. In Congress, conservative Northerners also voted with Southerners on sectional bills, blocking antislavery measures and passing proslavery ones. The most important of these bills formed the grand sectional compromises: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850. These compromises gained the aura of de facto constitutional amendments. Unfortunately, these grand sectional compromises did not solve the constitutional problems raised by slavery; they only delayed the final reckoning. On the federal bench, Northern conservatives cast votes for and occasionally wrote proslavery decisions, including most notoriously Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Thus, all three branches of the government established by the Constitution were affected by the sectional struggle over slavery.