Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region During the Final Decades of Slavery

Abstract

claimed to do so “in accordance with the spirit that actuated the venerated fathers of the Republic” (p. 200). The abolitionist spirit of the Constitution, Gilhooley argues, emerged as a specific response to this proslavery logic and used the tools laid out by Black writers in the 1820s. The payoff of Gilhooley’s thesis becomes evident when he arrives at Roger Taney’s Dred Scott decision. Taney’s decision to anchor his ruling in tenuous assertions of what the founders must have meant, without a significant degree of textual support, has long puzzled historians. Now, it appears clearly as the culmination, or at least the most extreme version, of a twodecade-old proslavery intellectual project. There is, Gilhooley asserts, an additional legacy of these struggles that outlived the politics of slavery. We are stuck with the founders and their spirit, and therefore locked into a mode of constitutional politics that is “tilted toward conservatism” (p. 248). This reviewer was left wondering if Gilhooley’s work might also hold a different lesson. Does the antebellum struggle over slavery not show us that a politics driven by the spirit of the founding might powerfully support a range of political ends, progressive as well as conservative? Either way, skeptics and proponents of constitutional politics alike could not ask for a better starting point than this book.