16 - The Constitution at War with Itself

Summary

This chapter focuses on constitutional disharmony as central to forging constitutional identity by looking at the place of Black citizenship prior to the Civil War. While there are powerful arguments that the Constitution could be seen as antislavery, even while it allowed for slavery to persist where it already existed, those who were antislavery did not give much thought to the place of Blacks within the constitutional order—particularly not to the question of Black citizenship. It was, rather, events such as the second Missouri Crisis of 1821 that forced the issue of Black citizenship onto the polity. Events forced constitutional actors to wrestle with questions that were not clear, or easily answered, by way of constitutional text. This chapter offers an important contrast to more prevalent approaches – to either originalism or moral readings – that too often try to dissolve constitutional disharmony.