Free Slave Nation by Alfred W. Blumrosen Page B

history to grapple with history itself.
    The Blumrosens are fascinated by contradiction and irony. The historical contradictions between slavery and freedom in America find parallels in the law they know best. American law was the guardian and the guarantor of slavery. The legal system rationalized and enforced slavery and discrimination. Yet, the law that guaranteed and fostered legal subjugation became an instrument of liberation with the 1954 school desegregation cases and the wideranging jurisprudence that has developed since. The Blumrosens are part of the generation of lawyers who changed American law. They also changed America.
    The authors investigate the sources of the old contradiction between slavery and freedom and find it in full form before the American Revolution. They reconstruct the straight line between slavery and our national origins. They show that the slavery question did not simply arise at the writing of the Constitution when the future of black slavery and its place in the new nation had to be publicly faced because it could no longer be avoided. The security of slavery had to be settled before the Revolution or the cause of independence and nationhood would have been stillborn.
    The Blumrosens bring fresh eyes to the problematic national emergence of slavery as an issue in the pre-Revolutionary period. Of course, slavery was a native institution originally present in all the colonies and ultimately shaped the South and its economy. For more than a century slavery flourished, increasingly favoring the South, which regarded slavery as indispensable to the products of its agricultural economy. However, black slavery was more than geographical. In the South, the practice hardened into an institution bolted into economic and cultural life, affecting everything it touched. Black slavery was not as useful to northern commerce and antislavery sentiment grew, but northern entanglement with slavery was deep and unavoidable. Although two nations were taking shape long before revolution was in the air, slavery quickly became a national issue once the idea of an independent nation began to take shape. The South insisted on slavery, but as the Blumrosens show, the North not only tolerated southern slavery, but early agreed to its permanence in the new nation.
    Although the issue grew to divide the country, slavery did not have to be squarely faced while the colonies were part of a mother country that tolerated it, allowing North and South each to go its own way. However, for the slavecentered South, even the possibility of this change was enough to light the spark for the coming revolution. The spark came with the
Somerset
decision in England that freed a slave brought to London by a colonist and raised a question as to slavery’s legitimacy in the Empire. Although this decision did not overturn slavery in the colonies, its logic was not lost on southerners. The Blumrosens take us from
Somerset
to the Revolution. They show that England had accommodated tax grievances in the past and might have compromised that issue further. However, for the South, compromise on slavery was unthinkable. Independence was the only solution.
    In
Slave Nation
, the Blumrosens go down seldom explored paths that lead to the pro-slavery compromise that was sewn into the national fabric well before the Revolution. The Revolutionary patriots in the North did not speak openly about maintaining slavery but made it clear to the South that slavery would not be disturbed. There would have been no revolution to create one nation if John Adams, the Massachusetts antislavery stalwart and other northerners had not accepted southern prerogatives on slavery. There would have been no union if both the Northwest Ordinance and the Constitution had not guaranteed the continuation of slavery in the southern territories and the entitlement of owners even to their slaves that escaped to the North. The price of freedom from England was bondage for African