"Recourse must be had to the history of those times" -- "The ground will shake" -- "Texts ... Designed for local and temporary use" -- "The further we recede from the birth of the Constitution" -- "The culture of cotton has healed its deadly wound" -- "Times now are not as they were" -- "We have to do not ... with the past, but the living present" -- A "modern Crispus Attucks".
Summary:
"In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts (the Bible and the Constitution) to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance"-- Provided by the publisher.
Series:
Cambridge historical studies in American law and society
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