re of the American revolutionary government to make a case for abolition of slavery along with liberation from Britain had the effect of sowing the seeds of eventual civil war. However, a distinctive feature of the American case is the fact that the behavior of its national political institutions--not simply partisan political factions and opposing armies--was central to the emergence of the policy that eventually prevailed. Lincoln seems to have been determined to work through America's slavery conflict in terms of its institutional--and, specifically, constitutional--character. The determinedly constitutional/institutional feature of Lincoln's slavery policy, while problematic for historical analysis of his administration and of his performance as a wartime president, is its distinguishing mark. Indeed, the weight of evidence is that Lincoln's ideas about the nexus of slavery and American political institutions had the effect of ensuring the postwar integrity and stability of those institutions as well as the reestablishment of the Union.
In the background of Lincoln's constitutionalism was the behavior of state and national political institutions toward slavery in the antebellum period. Conflicts between slavery and the system of federalism as envisioned by the framers of the American Constitution were implicit from 1793. In the process of reserving widely interpreted powers to the states while at the same time allowing the institution of slavery to sustain a significant portion of the country, the framers of the American "experiment" sowed the seeds of state-national rivalry and conflict that would ultimately lead to civil conflict. In any case, during negotiations over the Declaration in 1776 and the Constitution in 1793, "through bluster, compromise, and political blackmail over the question of union itself, [proslavery forces] secured power and protection for slavery" (Finkelman 23). What the compromise came down to in the fir...