Lincoln, Douglass, Fugitive Slave Law, and Constitutional Evil

• In Event: Liberalism, Republicanism, and Communal Freedom in American Political Thought

Abstract

Robinson Woodward-Burns paper, “Lincoln, Douglass, Fugitive Slave Law, and Constitutional Evil” argues that constitutions, framed through compromise, bind subjects to compromised, unjust provisions. The problem of constitutional evil, per Mark Graber, arises when subjects are asked to obey unjust practices not clearly authorized by constitutional text or history. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act presents such a problem. The Fugitive Slave Clause, drafted through bisectional compromise, endorsed the return of fugitive slaves, a moral evil. But the Clause did not clearly authorize the 1850 Act’s enforcement provisions, at least according to antislavery thinkers. Chief among these thinkers were Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the latter a former fugitive from slavery. Lincoln and Douglass disagreed on whether the Clause and 1850 Act bound Northern citizens and officeholders. Douglass’ skeptical reading of the Clause and broad reading of natural law authorized citizen resistance to the 1850 Act. Lincoln held lawmakers were oath-bound to the Clause and to slaveholder’s unjust but constitutional right to recapture fugitives under the 1850 Act, at least until the Civil War. Both saw that the framers intended the Clause authorize recapture, but Douglass as an orator hewed to the natural law against the 1850 Act and Lincoln as a representative hewed to the positive law under the 1850 Act. This article considers Douglass and the Lincoln on the 1850 Act, taking them as “representative men,” per Emerson’s term, who confronted the fundamental constitutional problem of the 1850s.

Author

• Robinson Woodward-Burns, Howard University