UC Berkeley

The Founding casts a long shadow over American life. Laden with cultural authority, the creation story of the United States Constitution figures prominently across public discourse, jurisprudence and historical scholarship. But the origins of this investment in original understandings, founding principles and framers’ visions do not. This dissertation asks when, why and how this popular and juridical commitment to the constitutional Founding arose. It finds answers in antebellum America’s searing conflicts over the future of slavery. It argues that as adversarial publics contested slavery’s temporal and territorial boundaries, they refashioned the Constitution into an imagined archive. Grasping for greater authority and dispositive settlements, they invoked visions ascribed to venerated national fathers and sought to enforce imputed original meanings beyond the words of the document. Americans litigated slavery’s future through their invention of a binding, revered and conclusive constitutional past. Providing a new history of constitutionalism from the early national period through Reconstruction, this dissertation traces how Americans produced, deployed and experienced the authority of the Founding around the central trauma of the age.

The first chapter depicts the post-Ratification world of public constitutional discourse before U.S. constitutional history ruled – before the genre even existed. In contrast, the following two chapters depict a transformation of vernacular constitutionalism and the construction of the Founding between the impasse over Missouri statehood and Nullification Crisis. The fourth chapter analyzes the everyday materials of constitutional learning that trained white Americans to revere and defer to the Founding, a posture central to antebellum constitutionalism. The fifth chapter examines the experiences of black Americans – free, fugitive and enslaved – as well as radical abolitionists as they variously defied the venerative consensus demanded by dominant constitutional culture. The sixth and seventh chapters consider the arena of formal law; they show how the authority of the Founding swept into courtrooms as a legitimating power, one that courts exercised aggressively but could not fully control. Turning to popular politics and government policy, the eighth chapter demonstrates how specific narratives about slavery at the Founding structured the unfolding sectional crisis. The Civil War broke open the Founding that had long constrained antislavery possibilities, and living Americans remade their Constitution after sixty years of textual stasis. As the epilogue argues, however, the Founding rose again to elide Reconstruction and sustain white reconciliation.

This dissertation expands U.S. constitutional history as a field and an object of study. Venturing deep into the everyday forums of constitutional life, it approaches the authority of the Founding as a question rather than a predicate to make two novel contributions to our understanding of slavery and law in the nineteenth century. First, by demonstrating new dimensions of slavery’s influence on political and legal life, it rewrites traditional chronologies of American constitutional development, yielding a sobering answer to the question of how citizens came to cherish their Constitution. In turn, the nexus of slavery and constitutionalism in this answer develops underrealized dimensions of the genesis of the Civil War. Second, in tracing how people reimagined the Constitution as an archive of promises about slavery, the dissertation exposes an epistemic transformation in how Americans perceived the nature and scope of the Constitution itself. This analysis raises a new model of popular constitutionalism characterized by deference to imagined, contested pasts. By studying authority instead of party-aligned disputes, it also shows an alternative way for historians and legal scholars to locate American constitutionalism in historical time. Finally, the dissertation tells a story of the Founding that speaks to our present. It studies how Americans claim the past and hold opposing truths; and it suggests that the allure and authority of original meanings cannot be separated from the United States’ history of slavery and racialized tyranny.