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The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government IS Relations to Slavery. By Don E. Fehrenbacher. Completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. [xiv], 466. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514177-6.)
Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic is a very fine history of the federal government's implication in the institution of slavery. Although its late author wrote the leading book on the Supreme Court's crucial Dred Scott decision, and despite the fact that he edited and completed David M. Potter's monumental The Impending Crisis (New York, 1976), this work will stand as Fehrenbacher's most important.
Fehrenbacher begins his study by taking issue with the Garrisonian inter pretation of the U.S. Constitution as decidedly proslavery. The bare wording of the Constitution did not make the government an agent of slaveholders, Fehrenbacher argues. Rather, it was as a result of unthinking policy decisions that the federal government came to be congenial to an institution that was increasingly isolated to the South. In traversing the dry terrain of the Constitution's slavery-related provisions, as in the rest of this book, the Fehrenbacher Express regularly throws off many sparks of unexpected insight.
Next, Fehrenbacher examines the history...