Slavery's Constitution

“A historian finds the seeds of an inevitable civil war embedded in the ‘contradictions, ambiguities, and silences’ about slavery in the Constitution.” — Kirkus Reviews Taking on decades of received wisdom, David Waldstreicher has written the first book to recognize slavery’s place at the heart of the US Constitution. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet, of its eighty-four clauses, six were directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clause