Abolition and American Origins

by Sean Wilentz

The turbulent politics of the present moment have reached far back into American history. Although not for the first time, the very character of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have been thrown into question by the hideous reality of slavery, long before and then during the founding era and for eighty years thereafter; and then by slavery’s legacy. In this accounting, slavery appears not as an institution central to American history but as that history’s essence, the system of white supremacy and economic oligarchy upon which everything else in this country has been built, right down to the inequalities and injustices of today.

Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University and the author most recently of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.