That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

This chapter situates the Declaration of Independence in relation to another founding document of the United States, the federal Constitution. It assesses the Declaration’s role in debates over the Constitution, first during the latter’s framing in 1787, then in the struggle for ratification, and then later as political actors sought to interpret each document in light of the other. From the outset, debate over the Constitution highlighted the Declaration’s multivalence as well as its rhetorical power. Both defenders and opponents of the Constitution have sought to show how their cause best aligned with the ideals and aspirations expressed in the Declaration. Anti-federalists and their successors constructed a powerful narrative which juxtaposed the Declaration’s call to liberty with the Constitution’s blueprint for authority. Yet there was from the beginning an equally strong tradition that saw the Constitution as a consummation of the Declaration’s promise. Either way, this chapter argues, the Declaration continues to help shape the meaning of the Constitution – and to have its own meaning remolded in turn.

Once, lawyers worked in small towns and rural communities across America. Abraham Lincoln, America’s most famous rural lawyer, even rose to the presidency. But today, rural areas have insufficient numbers, and as existing rural lawyers age the shortage gets worse. These legal deserts leave rural clients without lawyers and rural communities without law-educated individuals to serve as elected officials, volunteers, and community leaders.

One of the core themes of Gary Jacobsohn’s work has been his observation that constitutional aspirations tend to develop within a disharmonic constitutional order. Jacobsohn draws our attention to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as models for thinking about the unfolding of U.S. constitutional aspirations within a larger framework of constitutional disharmony. This essay revisits Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional aspiration, including its underlying philosophical premises, and concludes by putting it in dialogue with recent revisionist accounts of the U.S. constitutional order that downplay, deny, or mute the aspirations that Jacobsohn’s body of scholarship highlights and celebrates.

This essay explores different relationships between constitutional identity and constitutional politics. One purpose is descriptive. The first five sections briefly discuss the five relationships between constitutional identity and constitutional politics. Constitutional politics may be an instrumental means for achieving a particular constitutional identity; the means designed to achieve a particular constitutional identity; constitutive of constitutional identity; the constitutionally prescribed means for achieving a constitutional identity; or the constitutionally prescribed means for achieving any constitutional identity. The more fundamental goal is to undermine the “apple of gold” metaphor as a device for thinking about constitutional regimes. Constitutional politics in most constitutional regimes is as constitutive of constitutional identity as the substantive principles announced in such documents as the Declaration of Independence.

The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

Since the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Americans have rooted their national identity in their relationship with the wider world. America’s geopolitical position, its civilizing mission, its identity as the home of a chosen people, and its security requirements have shaped not only Americans’ external relations but also their very sense of themselves and who they are in a world of other peoples.

American nationalism has of course had several other sources than the outside world.1 The virtue of republican self-government – what might be identified as “civic nationalism” – has been an obviously powerful font of America’s self-identity, particularly the ways in which Americans have seen themselves as different, even superior, to other countries.

This chapter examines the meanings of moderation in the American political tradition, beginning with George Washington’s Farewell Address, continuing with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and ending with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

This chapter examines the prospects of moderation in America today. Conceived as a form of lively dialogue with the two imaginary interlocutors, it examines concrete solutions for empowering moderates’ voice in contemporary America. Special attention is paid to organizations like Braver Angels and More in Common that seek to build civic bridges to narrow ideological divides.

The Civil War marked the high point of state interposition resistance to the Union or Confederate governments. Sounding the alarm interposition occurred wherever governors and legislators believed their national government had exceeded its powers, particularly with the use of martial law, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and wartime conscription. Moreover, Lincoln’s use of emancipation as a war measure was criticized in North and South as going beyond the effort to preserve the Union and instead converting the war into an abolitionist-inspired moral crusade to end slavery and expand Black rights. After the Civil War, opposition mounted in state legislatures in the North and South to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Reconstruction policies, racial equality, and enhanced national power. The slogan of states’ rights was adopted by those who denied the outcome of the Civil War and by advocates of white supremacy. By the end of Reconstruction, interposition essentially died out, tainted with the discredited notion of nullification, secession and the Civil War, and lay dormant before its reemergence in the twentieth century.

The campaign songs of Abraham Lincoln help to carry a working-class hero into the White House, while no songs are sung about his background as a wealthy corporate lawyer. Lincoln’s love of opera is only one further dimension to the music of the Civil War era; the sides are drawn in the popular music of the Union and the Confederacy, while the songs of the newly emancipated Black soldiers herald the turn of the tide toward Union victory. The Irish contribution is also charted musically, as are such contentious subjects as the New York Draft Riots and the fate of the war’s prisoners and its disabled veterans. The hope of emancipated Black Americans in the wake of Sherman’s March through Georgia is sung to the skies, before the assassination of Lincoln paves the way for Andrew Johnson and the betrayal of Reconstruction.

While Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is often described as a private poet and there is no firm evidence that she shared either her fascicle booklets or the great majority of her poems with anyone, there is good evidence that Dickinson drew public attention to herself as a poet from her early years. In this sense, Dickinson was not at all private about her poetry. As a young woman she shared her poems and thoughts about poetry with readers whose response mattered to her, and doing so may have given her the confidence she needed to become the “Emily Dickinson” we know. She also wrote occasional passages of metered prose in her letters of this period – from a few beats to multiple implied lines and rhyme. In the final years of her life, her use of metered prose became more prominent. This essay will focus primarily on the decade during which Dickinson shaped herself as a poet, roughly from the late 1840s to 1858. After a brief review of the years of her greatest productivity, I will pick up my story of Dickinson’s transitions with the 1880s, when she increasingly wrote at this border of poetry and prose. While some aspects of Dickinson’s themes and style changed over her lifetime, as early as 1853 she had settled into the rhythms of highly compressed, short-lined metrical verse she would maintain – with rare exceptions – for the rest of her life, including in her passages of metered prose.

In September 1862, readers of the short-lived Continental Monthly might have encountered the following prediction by prominent editor and sometime politician Horace Greeley: The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellant [sic] commonwealths, but a true exemplification of “many in one” – many stars blended in one common flag – many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls.1

The last chapter discusses the major contentions leading up the civil war, that is, state rights and slavery. The first part focuses once again on the disagreement over the proper definition of the people. On the one hand, excerpts from John Calhoun’s writings demonstrate the Southern emphasis on state rights and his idea of the concurrent majority. On the other hand, Henry Clay’s speech on the Compromise Tariff Bill reveals his dedication to the Union and embrace of compromise as the founding principle of the United States. Daniel Webster’s Constitution and Union Speech gives insight into his controversial support of the Fugitive Slave Act in the name of constitutional obligations. The second part presents the arguments of the moral abolitionists, with excerpts from the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. In turn, the Southern reactionary defense of slavery is illustrated in selections from George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South and Hammond’s “mudsill theory.” The last section of the chapter offers excerpts of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, exhibiting his political pragmatism on the question of slavery and the maintenance of the Union.

The chapter discusses Douglass’s three major autobiographical narratives – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) – in multiple and sometimes competing contexts. Taken together, Douglass’s autobiographies, which are indebted to the American autobiographical tradition established by Benjamin Franklin, reveal a black leader who regularly revises himself and his ideas. The Narrative appears to advocate William Lloyd Garrison’s moral suasionism and to draw on the slave narrative tradition. But Douglass worked against that tradition when he revised the Narrative for publication in Ireland in 1845 and 1846. In the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass emphasized his close connections to the black community and his support for revolutionary violence. His monumental Life and Times, written near the end of his career, linked the struggles and contingencies of his own life with that of the nation.

This chapter shows how Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker used historical distance in their responses to Dred Scott. Parker tied the idea of the Constitution as the act of the ratifiers to the right of the people as interpreters. He believed that the founding generation’s expectation of abolition warranted a progressive popular reading. Lincoln insisted that the framers had used caution to word the Constitution in such a way that slavery would disappear from the American past once their descendants abolished the institution. That the Slave Power had obscured that expectation made it even more important to work towards its realization. Douglass also placed emphasis on the framers’ emancipationist expectations. He distinguished original antislavery meaning from obscuring post-founding-era construction and trusted that Americans would notice the distinction and then use the Constitution to usher in a new era of freedom. The slavery debates forced interpreters to confront historical distance, and Parker, Lincoln, and Douglass used it to insist on radically new readings of the Constitution. Historical distance had become an interpretive force in antebellum America.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s central contention that antebellum interpretive debates over slavery encouraged contextual readings of sacred texts and deepened a sense of historical distance from America’s favored biblical and founding pasts. It restates the argument that while some aimed to set aside the historical distance and change their readings revealed, others used distance and change in advancing new readings of the Bible and, especially, the Constitution. The conclusion narrates how Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln continued to use historical distance and the insight of historical contingency in working towards slavery’s abolition. Douglass found hope in Lincoln’s election, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and despite crucial differences between them, Douglass and Lincoln continued to advance antislavery readings of the Constitution based in the framers’ expectation of abolition. This reading gave shape to Lincoln’s Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address. The conclusion also indicates the limitations of approaches like Lincoln’s and emphasizes the need today for new kinds of historical narratives and new kinds of actions.

This chapter focuses on the constitutional debates of the early 1850s, when many antislavery writers narrated both the progress of moral insight, which they viewed as embodied in the rise of antislavery sentiment, and the Slave Power’s advances, which they tracked in the Fugitive Slave Act, fugitive slave cases, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In attempts to reconcile their perceptions of both general moral progress and peculiar moral decline, these writers characterized proslavery advances as anachronistic deviations from founding-era expectations and slavery’s unexpected spread as antithetical to the egalitarian spirit of their age. All of this indicated just how different the revolutionary past was from the present, signaling to their contemporaries that it was time to realize the permanent truths that had been enunciated in the transient founding past. In short, antislavery writers promoted a historical consciousness attentive to historical distance: sometimes they narrated the growth of moral opposition to slavery since the founding, and sometimes they narrated the Slave Power’s rise since that time, but in both cases, they pointed to the reality of change over time.