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“That’s because the Constitution—the Constitution as Lincoln and the Republicans understood it—was an antislavery document. To be sure, the founders had made compromises with slavery in order to create the Union, but those proslavery clauses were exceptions in a Constitution whose general rule was freedom. This was antislavery constitutionalism, and it saturated the Republican Party platforms of 1856 as well as 1860. Both platforms asserted that the principles of fundamental human equality and universal liberty “promulgated” in the Declaration of Independence were literally “embodied in the Constitution.” Debates over the meaning of the Declaration were commonplace”
― The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
― The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
“IN 1860 Abraham Lincoln ran for president on a Republican Party platform that proved Hale’s point by repeatedly invoking a Constitution that favored freedom over slavery. It proclaimed freedom to be the “normal condition of all the territory of the United States.” The Republicans did not directly call on Congress to pass a law banning slavery from the territories. What they actually said was that Congress had no authority “to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.” It wasn’t that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery, it was that Congress had no constitutional power to allow slavery into the territories.”
― The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
― The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
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