The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

By Noah Feldman

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer

Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution?

In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals.

The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues.

Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374720872

Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he is also founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law. A leading public intellectual, he is a contributing writer for Bloomberg View and the author of numerous books, including The Broken Constitution, Divided by God, and The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.

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Cover: The Broken Constitution by Noah FeldmanThe Broken Constitution by Noah Feldman

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In memory of Lois Silver

A moral crevasse has occurred: fanaticism and ignorance, political rivalry, sectional hate, strife for sectional dominion, have accumulated into a mighty flood, and pour their turgid waters through the broken Constitution.

—Jefferson Davis,

February 13, 1850

INTRODUCTION

Poised to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln found he could not write his name. He told the breathless witnesses—his private secretary John Nicolay, Secretary of State William Seward, and Seward’s son Frederick—that the reason was not any uncertainty on his part. He had been shaking hands for three hours that day and his hand was simply tired. His whole soul was in the decision to emancipate, Lincoln insisted. He was pausing only to avoid a tremulous signature because If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’¹

This story has become part of our Lincoln hagiography. It is invariably told to emphasize that the Great Emancipator had no ambivalence about his historic act. Lincoln’s reassurance of his colleagues is meant to reassure the listener of the president’s certainty. He acted decisively to create a new moral order, righting the wrong of slavery and ushering in a new era that would eventually be grounded in equal rights and citizenship for all.

Yet Lincoln’s explanation of why his hand was trembling and his insistence on his single-minded confidence also suggest a need to reassure himself about contradicting the considered position he had held about slavery for the entire thirty years of his public life. Until that juncture in the war, Lincoln had always said publicly and believed privately that the federal government had no constitutional power to end slavery, as troubling as that institution might have been to him. If Congress, the lawmaking branch, lacked the authority to emancipate the slaves, then the president acting on his own certainly had no such capacity.

Lincoln’s act of emancipating enslaved people held in the rebellious Confederacy marked the culmination of an extraordinary transformation in his beliefs about the meaning of the Constitution. He still purported to believe that slaves were private property, and that private property was protected by constitutional guarantee. Now, however, he had allowed himself to develop an additional belief: as commander in chief, he had the legal power to order the otherwise unconstitutional taking of the property of the citizens of states prosecuting the war of rebellion.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln had told the public that he was prepared to acknowledge the legal legitimacy of slavery if it would hold together the union. Slavery, according to this view, was enshrined in the Constitution. Indeed, as he saw it, the preservation of slavery was the condition for the creation and maintenance of the union. Union came first; freedom for African Americans a distant second. Emancipation represented a total reversal of this hierarchy of values. No wonder Lincoln’s hand trembled. By signing, he was subverting the very Constitution that was supposed to provide the reason for going to war in the first place.

In doing so, we know, Lincoln was transforming the meaning of the Civil War itself. What had begun as a war justified in the name of union now became a war to end slavery. But simultaneously, and just as important, Lincoln was also re-forming the basic character of the Constitution.

Today we conceive of the Constitution as a moral compact—a higher law that embodies an ideal form of government. Yet the original Constitution was not a moral ideal. It was a compromise that preserved slavery and, by doing so, allowed the United States to form and expand westward. By breaking the compromise to achieve emancipation, Lincoln was cleansing the Constitution of its compromised character and making it into a worthy object of veneration and moral aspiration.

Emancipation was not Lincoln’s only dramatic breaking and remaking of the existing Constitution through a radical, unilateral reinterpretation of its meaning. Even before he issued the proclamation, Lincoln confronted two other decision points of epochal importance that paved the way for the culminating third.

First, almost immediately on assuming the presidency, he had to decide—alone, without Congress’s help—to go to war to preserve the union. Only in retrospect does it seem obvious that force was constitutionally justified in the face of secession. James Buchanan’s administration had produced a report stating bluntly that the federal government had no constitutional authority to act if states seceded. Nothing in the Constitution authorized war to save the union. The precedent of 1776, as well as Lincoln’s own words and views from the 1840s, supported letting the South go. Yet according to him—and only to him—his oath of office was an oath registered in Heaven to preserve the union.² Lincoln chose war, reinterpreting the Constitution through the claim that it had been broken by the South and that his action was justified to repair the breach.

Second, Lincoln acted—again alone, without Congress—to suspend habeas corpus in the first days of the war, effectively transforming himself into a constitutional dictator. The best and most obvious reading of the Constitution gave Congress alone the power to eliminate an arrested person’s basic right to a judicial hearing when deemed necessary in cases of war or rebellion. Congress was not in session when Lincoln acted; but when it met months later, in July, it refused to ratify Lincoln’s actions. The president ignored the implicit rebuke and began imprisoning war opponents in the territory stretching from Washington, D.C., to New York, including a member of Congress and almost half the Maryland legislature. Lincoln tried to back away a year later, offering amnesties and releasing some political prisoners. But then he acted unilaterally again, this time suspending habeas corpus nationwide on September 24, 1862. As a result, thousands of civilians all over the Union were arrested and detained without trial, often for months or even years. Scores of newspapers critical of the war were shut down or blocked from being sent through the mail. Congress did not ratify this decision until March 1863. Over the course of the war, Lincoln’s policies and orders created the most extreme suppression of free speech to occur at any time in U.S. history.

Lincoln’s effectiveness as a kind of dictator who could suspend constitutional rights at will, based on a claim of necessity, served as a model for the process that led him to abolish slavery by executive command. The Constitution—understood as the legal framework of the union—provided Lincoln with the basis for going to war in the first place on the theory that states had no constitutional authority to secede and that as president he had the constitutional duty to stop them. Once the Constitution had been broken by secession, however, the war to reestablish it created a new constitutional situation, one in which the principles and rules embodied in the peacetime Constitution could be broken and transformed by the president in the effort to save the Constitution itself. The breaking of the compact justified breaking the rules the compact contained. Rupture led to rupture. And that rupture led to transformation.

THE CONTRADICTORY CONSTITUTION

The subject of this book is the extraordinary arc of reversal in Lincoln’s understanding of the Constitution—and its climactic, historic effects on the Constitution and the nation itself. My aim is to paint a portrait of Lincoln as a constitutional thinker: one of the most influential in U.S. history, and the most influential of all on the subject of the Constitution in crisis. To this end, I tell Lincoln’s story and the story of the Constitution in tandem, highlighting a range of voices, including those of African Americans and women who belong in the historical record alongside elected politicians. The vicissitudes of the Constitution, including still-relevant debates about whether the Constitution was inherently a proslavery document, can help us understand Lincoln’s trajectory. In turn, Lincoln’s evolution and high-stakes decisions reveal how the prewar Constitution came to be ruptured and remade.

The first part of the story follows Lincoln through his early encounters with the expanding United States and his entrance into politics. It shows that the Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified over the next two years, had a fundamentally different moral character from the post–Civil War Constitution. The Constitution we know today enshrines the value of human equality that almost all Americans share, even if that value has not always been implemented in practice. In contrast, the antebellum Constitution rested on a compromise that was understood from the start to be amoral or even immoral: namely, the preservation and perpetuation of slavery.

That compromise over slavery was understood by the Constitution’s framers and supporters to be necessary in order to achieve the greater goal of union. Slavery was a wrong, according to most of the founders, including a good number of slaveholders like James Madison. But it was a wrong that could be tolerated to serve the greater good of union. Without guarantees to continue slavery, the Southern slaveholding states would never have agreed to the Constitution. The compromise over slavery was justified to create and preserve the union.

As the United States grew, union gradually came to be an almost mystical concept. But concretely, the union developed into a practical political arrangement that enabled the United States to expand west and south into new territory and become a continental power. Without union, there could have been no settlers colonizing new territories and making them into new states—and no vast profits in land speculation and agriculture. Without union, the United States would have been stuck as an Eastern Seaboard power, prone to the same internal struggles over land and resources as the European states, which were themselves locked in by their geography. Without union, there could be no manifest destiny.

The Constitution was simply the necessary precondition for the union—the legally binding, contractual agreement that embodied the compromise that enabled the union to be. It was not a higher law in the moral sense, as many would come to believe in later years. It was, rather, an all-encompassing basic law. To Americans who sought territorial expansion, it was necessary to achieve that goal. To those more skeptical of expansion, the Constitution was nonetheless necessary to preserve the union from collapse.

Seeing it as a structure of compromise created a profound contradiction for every single supporter of the Constitution who also believed in the wrongness of slavery. From 1789 until 1861, if you believed in the Constitution, you were believing in an agreement that contained and continued a deep moral wrong. If you were willing to fight and die for the union, you were necessarily also willing to fight for the perpetuation of slavery as a subordinate but necessary condition. A handful of abolitionists, white and Black, condemned the Constitution as evil on account of the compromise. Another handful, also including thinkers of both races, insisted that the Constitution, all evidence to the contrary, actually opposed or outlawed slavery. Those white Southerners who saw slavery as morally righteous felt no conflict: they endorsed the Constitution as protecting slaveholders’ rights, while fretting that the guarantees might be breached. Almost everyone else—the mainstream of antebellum Americans—treated the constitutional compromise over slavery as legitimate despite the moral wrongfulness of the institution that the compromise protected and preserved.

Lincoln accepted this contradictory compromise. More than that: as an admirer of Henry Clay, the great compromiser, and as a member of the Whig Party, the party of sectional compromise, Lincoln was fully committed to preserving the compromise Constitution in order to preserve the union.

Of course, a constitution built on a compromise with slavery was prone to ultimate crisis—and rupture. Lincoln’s early beliefs and experiences reveal how this inevitable constitutional crisis was built into the compromise itself as it developed during the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s. Expansion was the reason for many opponents of slavery to accept the compromise. Yet expansion created the conditions for new conflict over whether future states would be slave or free.

People like Lincoln and his family, moving from Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois in a single generation, brought their values and beliefs with them. The frontier was thus settled by white Americans who, depending on their interests and ideals, either wanted to bring slavery or a ban on slavery into their newly settled territories. The imperative to enable this settlement movement is a large part of the reason that the North continued to accept and reaccept the compromise on slavery.

Frontier settlement—the dynamic some academics now call settler colonialism—destabilized the very compromise that had been made to enable it. The decades-long struggle over whether new states would be slave or free became itself a proxy for the struggle over the future of slavery and the possibility of a continuing constitutional union. Lincoln’s own path shows this, as he traveled from prioritizing the Constitution and union to reordering his values to place the death of slavery over the constitutional value of law.

RUPTURE

Rupture in our constitutional and national fabric remains paradoxically the untold story of the Civil War—the topic almost no one has wanted to touch in the vast historiography of the war and of Lincoln’s role in it. With our constitutional fabric again under pressure, now is the right time to recast the first Constitution as an enterprise that ultimately failed, and to substitute a narrative of a repaired and transformed Constitution for the received narrative of continuity.

Civil war is the very definition of a failed constitution. The U.S. Constitution failed from 1861 to 1865. It was not temporarily suspended or continued only in the North. The Constitution broke and was broken. It did not recover. It was remade in the aftermath of the war into something new and different. The new birth of freedom that Lincoln named in the Gettysburg Address was to be as different from the old constitutional order as the New Testament was from the Old, to use the metaphor that Lincoln intended to invoke.³

It is commonplace today to speak of the U.S. Constitution as the world’s oldest, continuously operating since its ratification in 1789. But this claim is patently untrue. After the Civil War, both sides had strong reasons to suppress the narrative of rupture in favor of the story of continuity. The reasons for the denial continue until today.

This book seeks to retell the story of the meaning of the Constitution in the Civil War and of Lincoln’s decisive action not as the story of successful salvation, but as something more dramatic, and more extreme: the frank breaking and frank remaking of the entire order of union, rights, constitution, and liberty.

Many historians who write about the Civil War are still drawn to the perennial question of what caused the conflict. No wonder, since Lincoln’s own public explanation for the war changed while it was in progress. Nearly all scholars today believe that, as Lincoln put it in his second inaugural address, slavery was, somehow, the cause of the war.⁴ Yet one school of thought, the so-called neo-revisionist, emphasizes Lincoln’s conservative caution when elected in 1860, and reads secession as an overreaction by Southerners who mistakenly believed that his election posed an existential threat to slavery. The other school, often called fundamentalist, holds that the threat to slavery was real, or fundamental, and that Lincoln and other Northern unionists were committed to policies intended to end slavery.⁵

This book offers a different perspective—one informed centrally by the structure of the compromise Constitution and Lincoln’s changing relation to it. The compromise Constitution, I argue, was a framework for compromise over slavery so basic to the structure of the union before the war that no one could imagine breaking it by abolishing slavery nationally and still preserving the union intact. Lincoln’s hope before the war that slavery would eventually become extinct depended on a vague, indeterminate fantasy that the compromise framework could eventually evolve so that slavery would be abolished voluntarily by slave states, with compensation for slaveholders and colonization of freed slaves to Africa.⁶ The neo-revisionists are correct that Lincoln himself would not have countenanced any other sort of abolition were it not for secession and the war. To do so would have broken the Constitution as he knew it.

At the same time, the compromise Constitution contained a fundamental contradiction that ensured its instability: the compromise structure enabled the union to expand, yet every expansion destabilized the compromise by raising anew the question of whether slavery itself should be extended. Southern secessionists came to see this contradiction as so devastating that it would eventually make further compromise impossible. They seceded because they sensed, correctly, that compromise over the extension of slavery had come to an end. The fundamentalists are therefore right to say that, for the seceding Southern states, the threat to slavery was indeed existential.

It took Lincoln well over a year of his presidency—a period in which secession had occurred and the war raged—to acknowledge the reality that the old constitutional compromise could never be restored. When he eventually did, the Emancipation Proclamation was the result. The rupture of the Constitution opened the door for its reconstruction on new terms—as the moral Constitution we know and revere today.

The transformation took three constitutional amendments. They abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the laws for all citizens, and extended voting rights to African American men. Over the next 150 years, those amendments were by turns applied during Reconstruction; betrayed through the rise of Jim Crow segregation; and redeemed by Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the landmark laws enacted as a result of the movement’s influence: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today, more than ever, we realize that the redemption was itself incomplete. We remain, however, committed to the idea that the moral Constitution embodied in those amendments should be our beacon. Lincoln’s transformed, moral version of the Constitution endures.

One

THE COMPROMISE CONSTITUTION

Abraham Lincoln’s early biography epitomizes the most powerful energy pulsing through the new republic: the energy of expansion. His grandfather, the Revolutionary War captain Abraham Lincoln, for whom he was named, was born in Pennsylvania and as a young man moved to Virginia, then the population center and political powerhouse of the newly formed United States. In 1781, the War of Independence not yet over, the first Abraham Lincoln moved his family to Jefferson County, Kentucky.

Claimed by the state of Virginia, and not yet a state of its own, Kentucky was the Western frontier. It was contested territory, still peopled by American Indians protecting their own homes. And on that frontier, Captain Lincoln met a fate not unknown to settlers who propose to take land from its inhabitants: he was killed during a raid by a Native American who, according to family tradition, was himself shot on the spot by the captain’s eldest son, Mordecai. Eight-year-old Thomas Lincoln, the captain’s youngest son—Abraham’s father—saw it all.

Thomas grew up in Kentucky, married Nancy Hanks, and had three children, one of whom, also named Thomas, died shortly after birth. He repeatedly saved money and bought property to establish a farm. But each time, he was thwarted by the uncertain land titles that were common in Kentucky, where there had never been a single, agreed-upon land survey that could have definitively established boundaries and ownership. Thomas Lincoln lost three farms in legal disputes, a direct consequence of the piecemeal way that the Kentucky frontier had been occupied and settled. In December 1816, when Abraham Lincoln was nine, Thomas moved the family westward into southern Indiana, to a community called Little Pigeon Creek.

The Lincolns lived in Indiana for fourteen years. They did not prosper. Two years after their arrival, Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, died of milk sickness. This was a distinctly frontier settlement form of poisoning: domesticated cows would eat the white snakeroot plant that grew wild in the Ohio River Valley and then produce milk containing the fatal toxin tremetol. Thomas went back to Kentucky to court and marry Sarah Bush Johnston, bringing her and her three children to join the Lincolns in Indiana. Abraham Lincoln grew up in penury, working hard from an early age to help keep the family from financial ruin.

The solution to economic hardship in Indiana was another move west. On March 6, 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one, his family crossed the Wabash River from Indiana into Illinois. Admitted as a state twelve years earlier, Illinois lay at the edge of the country. Only Missouri extended farther west. Working together, Lincoln, his father, and a dozen relatives cleared trees, built a log cabin, and split rails to fence in ten acres of ground.

DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI

The Lincoln family’s steady generational movement from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois mirrored the comparably gradual progress of white settlers westward. As a young man, Lincoln took two trips down the Mississippi by flatboat to New Orleans—in 1828 and 1831. These journeys showed a different direction of expansion: south, through the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase.

Lincoln’s trips downriver are frequently discussed in modern biographies because they exposed Lincoln firsthand to the phenomenon of African slavery, which was common in Kentucky, where he was born, but not in Indiana or Illinois, where he grew up and lived as a young man. New Orleans, Lincoln’s destination on both trips, featured the largest slave markets anywhere in North America. Our first glimpses of Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery do indeed emerge in connection with the flatboat journeys.

But the boat trips also introduced Lincoln to the riverine geography that shaped the structure of the economy in states like Illinois and Missouri—and thus to the underlying logic of the compromise Constitution. The produce of those central states—and of Indiana and Kentucky—flowed down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From there it could be distributed to the South, to markets along the Eastern Seaboard all the way north, and abroad to the Caribbean and Europe. The north-to-south flow of the river gave shape to the direction of commerce, and hence to the flow of wealth. Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British in New Orleans at the tail end of the War of 1812 had guaranteed American control over the port and consolidated the growth of the United States on both sides of the Mississippi by ensuring free shipping. Expansion west would not have been economically viable had it not been for the outlet to the South where the agricultural products of the frontier could be sent and sold. The maintenance of the delicate balance of states for this project of expansion had come to be the real-world function of the Constitution.

The flatboats on which Lincoln made his two journeys were themselves artifacts of the geography of expansion—and of the way rivers defined reality in the early United States. Some eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide, according to the scholar who has spent the most time reconstructing the journey, the flatboat for Lincoln’s first trip was almost certainly built by hand by Lincoln and his friend Allen Gentry, whose father, James Gentry, paid for the materials and employed Lincoln at a rate of eight dollars a month. The timber would have been cut down near the spot where the boat was to be built—Rockport, Indiana, in the case of the 1828 trip. The second time, in 1831, Lincoln and his cousin John Hanks built the boat at Sangamo Town, Illinois.

A flatboat was an unusual type of vessel: purpose-built for one long trip out of materials available where the trip started. It required no specialized shipbuilding skills, because there were no specialized shipbuilders on the frontier. Instead, its construction could be accomplished by anyone who possessed the general carpentry skills of a frontier resident—like the young Lincoln.

Most notably, the flatboat had no sail or engine. It was steered by a single sixty-foot oar, or streamer, and two side oars known as sweeps. Strictly speaking, none of these oars propelled the boat, except over very short distances. The energy to take the eighty-foot craft a distance of 1,300 miles would come almost entirely from the current, itself a product of gravity, as the rivers flowed downhill. Of those miles, more than a thousand were traveled on the great Mississippi, the river whose course shaped the history of the United States more than any other single geographical feature.

The contents of the flatboats also told a story. On Lincoln’s first trip, the aim was to bring produce to market in New Orleans. James Gentry was a farmer with a thousand acres of land, but most of the produce was not his. Gentry also owned a store and controlled a river landing on the Ohio River. The produce came from other farmers nearby, who traded what they grew for goods from Gentry’s store. Cash was scarce on the frontier, and barter was the common solution. By bringing what was grown along the Ohio River to New Orleans and selling it for cash, Gentry would be injecting currency into the Indiana economy.

On Lincoln’s second trip downriver, the flatboat he built was outfitted to carry livestock—mostly hogs raised in Illinois, which had to be fed and tended during the long trip. Like the produce, the hogs represented the contribution that the frontier economy made to markets in the South and beyond. Of course, produce could be grown and livestock raised closer to New Orleans. But the climate there, as in the rest of the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, made it more profitable to grow cotton, which could not be profitably grown north of the Piedmont.

The way to make money in the old Northwest Territory—the area between the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Ohio River—was by clearing land, settling it, and farming it. The value of produce on the frontier depended on getting it downriver to the port of New Orleans. Before navigational improvements and canals allowed steamboats to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and then all the way to New Orleans, flatboats like Lincoln’s were the crucial link along the artery that defined the economy of the Northwest.

As a product of northern Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, Lincoln lacked direct experience of slavery before his two trips downriver. He also lacked, then and later, direct personal relationships with African Americans. What he saw and experienced on his flatboat trips south would shape his thinking in the future, but perhaps no more—and maybe less—than the fact that he had grown up in a milieu that was almost exclusively white.

The reason slavery did not flourish in the places Lincoln lived was partly economic and partly ideological. When the original thirteen states had been British colonies, slavery was legally permitted in all of them. It gradually became clear, however, that the economics of slavery would mean great profits for slaveholders primarily in states where labor-intensive cash crops—as opposed to produce for daily consumption—could be grown on a large scale and sold on the global market. Tobacco in Virginia is the most famous example from the early years of the republic; rice in South Carolina is another from the same period.

In states without cash-crop economies, moral opposition to slavery gradually drove legislatures to outlaw the practice. It is important to emphasize the gradual nature of abolition. Many states outlawed slavery by making the future-born children of existing slaves into indentured servants, keeping their parents in an enslaved status. In New York, for example, whites held slaves for household service through the revolutionary period, and in New York City slaves may have numbered high as 20 percent of the population. In 1799, New York State passed a law mandating gradual abolition, but complete abolition did not follow until 1827.

In the states where slavery on a large scale was economically valuable, the ideology of abolition never made major inroads. That is one reason to believe that economic logic was the determinative factor in the persistence of the practice. Moral beliefs and ideology mattered, to be sure—but they were given the scope to influence real-world legislation only when economic interest permitted it.

Several of the most influential framers of the Constitution, including Southerners, accepted the immorality of slavery. James Madison is an outstanding example. A Virginian slaveholder his entire life, he simultaneously acknowledged the human impulse to freedom. Writing to his father in 1783 about a slave called Billey, Madison explained that he could not think of punishing Billey by selling him to the Deep South or the Caribbean merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy pursuit, of every human being.¹ Madison, that is, recognized liberty as a fundamental human right. Yet his entire livelihood, and the entire structure of his daily existence, depended on the institution of slavery—and he was unable or unwilling to resolve the contradiction. Economic reality trumped moral intuitions.

Madison and other Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder and lead author of the Declaration of Independence, did have a story to tell themselves about how the contradiction at the heart of their worldview might someday be resolved: they expected that slavery would gradually be abolished as it gradually ceased to be economically beneficial anywhere, including the South. Implausible as it may sound now, that belief was not entirely groundless when the Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ratified two years later. The Virginia tobacco crop was already beginning to lose its profitability in the late eighteenth century, mostly as a result of soil exhaustion. Neither Madison nor Jefferson, both proprietors of large plantations, ever made much of a profit from the agriculture they practiced with the labor of enslaved persons. Indeed, both before and after their presidencies, the two men struggled to make ends meet at their plantations, despite the fact that both took a scientific interest in land management. Both understood that the rise of manufacturing would eventually transform the U.S. economy, and that it would not favor the employment of slave labor.

An epoch-making technological innovation thwarted the framers’ expectations: the invention of the cotton gin, or engine, patented by Eli Whitney in 1794. Although mechanical separation processes had previously been developed for long-staple cotton, Whitney’s machine sped up the process of separating usable fibers from useless seeds for short-staple cotton, which (unlike the long-staple variety) could be grown inland, far from the sea.² In a single technological stroke, the cotton gin made cotton growing into a highly profitable enterprise throughout the huge swath of the North American continent that would come to be called the Cotton Belt—profitable, that is, if the intensive labor of picking the cotton could be performed by slaves who were not paid wages for their work.

Growing cotton exhausted the soil quickly. One solution was to let the land rest by planting beans or other legumes; another was to fertilize extensively. The easier and often cheaper solution was for growers to move to lands newly taken from Native Americans, bringing enslaved people to do the labor. From South Carolina and Georgia, where almost all American cotton was grown as late as 1811, cultivation expanded westward to Alabama and Louisiana, and then to Mississippi, Arkansas, and eventually Texas.³ By 1820, a third of U.S. cotton was grown west of Georgia; by 1860, the proportion had grown to three-quarters.⁴ The upshot was that national westward expansion became a necessary condition for continuing cotton-growing profits—a land rush driven by a military-cotton complex that, as the historian Sven Beckert has argued, constantly pushed the boundaries of the United States, seeking fresh lands to grow cotton.⁵ In the middle of the nineteenth century, fully two-thirds of U.S. cotton was growing on land that had not been part of the country when the century began.⁶

Once the cotton gin changed the economics of slavery, the ideology of abolition came to have a more limited scope for its operation. In places where large-scale slavery remained economically inefficient, abolitionism had opportunities to enact its objective into law. Where cotton grew, however—or where it might grow in the future—the odds of abolition gaining many white adherents were vanishingly small.

Kentucky, where Lincoln was born, was a state divided into very different cultural and economic zones. In the Bluegrass region, climate and culture resembled those of the Southern states, and slavery flourished. Where Lincoln was born, in a log cabin at Sinking Springs Farm, on what was then the Kentucky frontier, slavery existed only on a small scale. There were few African Americans, and we have no record that the young Lincoln met or knew anyone of color in the Knob Creek Valley where he lived until the age of seven. Abolitionists found a toehold, and in 1815 and 1833 the state passed laws barring the importation of slaves. Kentucky was too connected to the South for full-on abolition. But its distinctive mixed character meant that the economic realities of slavery and the moral possibilities of abolition were profoundly intertwined.

Indiana, across the Ohio River to the northwest, where Lincoln spent the formative years from age seven to twenty-one, was part of the original Northwest Territory. According to the Northwest Ordinance, adopted by Congress in 1787, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude was permitted there. Despite the text of the ordinance, some settlers from the South brought slaves with them and continued to hold them in bondage. But slavery at scale was never economically viable in Indiana, where it was not profitable to grow tobacco or cotton. Abolitionists began to campaign even before Indiana’s statehood, and the territorial legislature made it difficult to hold slaves. Indiana became a state in 1816, the same year the Lincolns moved to Little Pigeon Creek. The state’s first constitution made slavery illegal. Lincoln does not seem to have known African Americans when he lived there, either. His neighbors were white settlers, some of whom no doubt retained proslavery sympathies associated with their Southern origins.

In the Illinois that Lincoln encountered when he crossed the Wabash, the situation was roughly similar. Illinois had also been part of the original Northwest Territory, and the Illinois Constitution of 1819 stated that slavery should not be thereafter introduced. That amounted to a gradual abolition but did not free slaves who were already being held in the state. Although there were abolitionists in Illinois, there were also many settlers from slave states. Missouri, where slavery was lawful, was right across the river. In 1824, Illinois voters rejected a proposed constitutional convention to formalize total abolition immediately. Only in 1848 did a new state constitution make slavery illegal there. So white were Indiana and Illinois that, in the early 1850s, both would enact legal regulations intended to keep Black people out of their states entirely.⁷

As Lincoln traveled downriver in 1828 and 1831, he witnessed a geography that changed gradually—and a population that changed with the topography. Just beneath the point where the Ohio River and the Wabash