This chapter narrates African American historian William C. Nell’s efforts to highlight the actions of black Revolutionaries. His focus on figures such as Crispus Attucks, rather than static texts, such as the Constitution, laid claim to the first American Revolution in a way that signaled the need for a second revolution. While emphasizing instances of black assertiveness, Nell also narrated the instantiation of white prejudice. This indicated the promise of contingent change: if the human actions of the post-revolutionary period had betrayed the human actions of the revolutionary era, then new revolutionaries could reconstruct the current proslavery and prejudicial context and grant black contemporaries the rights for which their forebears fought. This interpretive frame inspired black reponses to Dred Scott, including the creation of Crispus Attucks Day. The Attucks commemorators crafted historical arguments to confront the racial prejudice they identified in both Roger B. Taney’s decision and in fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker’s speeches, and they looked to the first American Revolution to envision a second revolution in which blacks would play starring roles.

This chapter shows that biblical criticism encouraged some figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, to abandon what they perceived as transient historical grounds for what they understood as a transcendent moral sphere. Many scholars have stressed the ahistorical aspects of Transcendental belief and emphasized the ways in which Transcendentalism outgrew its Unitarian roots. In doing so, however, they have often neglected to note how historical arguments freed heterodox thinkers such as Emerson and Parker in their attempts to build atemporal worlds. While most biblical scholars used historical readings to ground universal truths in a biblical past, these Transcendentalists employed historical explication to unmoor such truths from that historical setting. The growing perception of historical distance assisted them in that effort. As these and other thinkers drew attention to the shiftiness of historical evidence, the limitations of time, and the remoteness of the past, they exposed the transience of the historical grounds on which American Protetants based their faith.

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.