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. More than forty years ago, when a similar bleak pessimism was in the air, the pioneering African American historian Benjamin Quarles remarked on that pessimism’s distortions. The history of American slavery could never be properly grasped, Quarles wrote, “without careful attention to a concomitant development and influence — the crusade against it,” a crusade, he made clear, that commenced before the American Revolution. Quarles understood that examining slavery’s oppression without also examining the anti-slavery movement’s resistance to it simplifies and coarsens our history, which in turn coarsens our own politics and culture. “The anti-slavery leaders and their organizations tell us much about slavery,” he insisted — and, no less importantly, “they tell us something about our character as a nation.” If we are to speak about the nation’s origins, we must get the origins right. As we continue to wrestle with the brutal, and soul-destroying power of racism in our society, it is essential that we recognize the mixed and mottled history upon which our sense of our country must rest. In judging a society, how do we responsibly assess its struggle against evil alongside the evil against which it struggles? With what combination of outrage and pride, alienation and honor, should we define our feelings about America? 
On November 5, 1819, Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, ex-U.S. Congressman, and past director of the U.S. Mint, wrote to former President James Madison, enclosing a copy of the proceedings of a meeting held a week earlier in Trenton, New Jersey, opposing the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. The crisis over Missouri — which would lead to the famous Missouri Compromise the following year — had begun in the House of Representatives in February, but Congress had been out of session for months with virtually no sign of popular concern. In late summer, Boudinot, who was 79 and crippled by gout, mustered the strength to help organize a modest protest gathering in his hometown of Burlington, long a center of anti-slavery. The far larger follow-up meeting in Trenton was truly impressive, a “great Assemblage of persons” that included the governor of New Jersey and most of the state legislature. The main speaker, the Pennsylvania Congressman Joseph Hopkinson, who was also a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had backed the House amendment that touched off the crisis, and his speech in Trenton, according to one report, “rivetted the attention of every auditor.” Boudinot, too ill to travel to the state capital, agreed nevertheless to chair a committee of correspondence that wrote to dozens of prominent men, including ex-President Madison, seeking their support. If Madison ever responded to Boudinot’s entreaty, the letter has not survived, but no matter: Madison’s correspondence with another anti-slavery advocate made clear that he was not about to support checking the future of slavery in Missouri. Boudinot’s and the committee’s efforts did, however, meet with approval from antislavery notables such as John Jay. It also galvanized a multitude of anti-Missouri meetings all across the northern states, pressuring Congress to hold fast on restricting slavery’s spread. “It seems to have run like a flaming fire through our middle States and causes great anxiety,” Boudinot wrote to his nephew at the end of November. The proslavery St. Louis Enquirer complained two months later that the agitation begun in Burlington had reached “every dog-hole town and blacksmith’s village in the northern states.” The protests, the largest outpouring of mass antislavery opinion to that point in American history, were effective: by December, according to the New Hampshire political leader William Plumer, it had become “political suicide” for any free-state officeholder “to tolerate slavery beyond its present limits.” Apart from indicating the scope and the fervor of popular antislavery opinion well before the rise of William Lloyd Garrison, two elements in this story connect in important ways to the larger history of the antislavery movement in the United States, one element looking forward from 1819, the other looking backward. Of continuing future importance was the breadth of the movement’s abolitionist politics, as announced in the circular of the Trenton mass meeting. Although it aimed, in this battle, simply to halt the extension of slavery, the anti-Missouri movement’s true aim, the circular announced, was nothing less than the complete destruction of slavery in the United States. “The abolition of slavery in this country,” it proclaimed, was one of “the anxious and ardent desires of the just and humane citizens of the United States.” It was not just a matter of requiring that Missouri enter as a free state: by blocking human bondage from “every other new state that may hereafter be admitted into the Union,” it would be only a matter of time before American slavery was eradicated. Just as important, the abolitionists took pains to explain that restricting slavery in this way fell within the ambit of Congress’ powers, “in full accordance with the principles of the Constitution.” Here lay the elements of the antislavery constitutionalism — asserting congressional authority over slavery in places under its jurisdiction — that would evolve, over the ensuing thirty-five years, into the Republican Party’s program to place slavery, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “in the course of ultimate extinction.” The second connection, looking backward, was embodied by Elias Boudinot. Some historians have linked Boudinot’s antislavery enthusiasm
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence