The last chapter discusses the major contentions leading up the civil war, that is, state rights and slavery. The first part focuses once again on the disagreement over the proper definition of the people. On the one hand, excerpts from John Calhoun’s writings demonstrate the Southern emphasis on state rights and his idea of the concurrent majority. On the other hand, Henry Clay’s speech on the Compromise Tariff Bill reveals his dedication to the Union and embrace of compromise as the founding principle of the United States. Daniel Webster’s Constitution and Union Speech gives insight into his controversial support of the Fugitive Slave Act in the name of constitutional obligations. The second part presents the arguments of the moral abolitionists, with excerpts from the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. In turn, the Southern reactionary defense of slavery is illustrated in selections from George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South and Hammond’s “mudsill theory.” The last section of the chapter offers excerpts of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, exhibiting his political pragmatism on the question of slavery and the maintenance of the Union.

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.

This chapter surveys the legal history of the term "due process of law," from Magna Carta, the Statutes of Edward III, and the Petition of Right to the writings of William Blackstone and the opinions of antebellum state-level court cases. It argues that there was no concept of "substantive due process" in the antebellum period. It refutes arguments that due process prohibited class legislation, limited states to reasonable exercises of the police powers, or underwent a change in meaning as a result of abolitionist constitutional thinkers.

The Prologue orients readers to the classic tradition of American exceptionalism based in the Pilgrims and puritans, explaining how that tradition arose and to what effect. Sketching the development of a “puritan origins” thesis from the early republic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the prologue ends in 1990, when a recognizable shift in puritan studies gained momentum. The Prologue gives readers a sense of how American collective memory built a story of noble Pilgrims fleeing persecution and establishing religious freedom on American shores. Pilgrim anniversaries of Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower landing were traditionally meant to celebrate and venerate an exceptional story of America rooted in New England and attributed to the singular virtues and values of the puritans. Yet even when scholars, politicians, pundits, and commentators turned against the puritans and despised them for various reasons, they still wrote stories in which the puritans were held responsible for all that the United States had become. Whether in love or hatred, in both praise and condemnation, the “puritan origins” thesis guided a great deal of American puritan studies throughout the twentieth century.