Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition

"Justin Dyer has provided a powerful reminder that there was nothing inevitable about the end of slavery. He has also given us a subtle study of the relationship between natural law and the Constitution during one of the critical re-foundings in American political development. This is a timely reminder that there is nothing inevitable about constitutional politics."-Jeremy D. Bailey, University of Houston "Justin Dyer issues a bold defense of an anti-slavery constitution now under attack by revisionists. His emphasis on the natural rights foundation of the constitution and anti-slavery movement is an important analysis of the great cause of nineteenth century American constitutionalism."-Mark Graber, University of Maryland "Justin Buckley Dyer's study is a sustained effort to vindicate the righteousness of the American constitutional founding through the recovery of its antislavery ideals, rooted in natural law. The book is a worthy addition to the literature of antislavery constitutionalism in America - and is especially valuable in the contributions it makes to our understanding of the wellsprings of key elements of the constitutional thought of Abraham Lincoln."-Ken I. Kersch, Boston College "This lucidly written, precisely argued, and carefully researched essay does two things at once: It situates nineteenth-century antislavery constitutionalism in the context of natural law and liberal theory, and it assesses the natural law and modern liberal accounts of American constitutionalism by applying them to the critical test, namely, their power to explain the debate over slavery that led to the Civil War and emancipation. Justin Dyer writes with moral clarity and historical circumspection, and he has produced the best introduction to this critical subject that I know."-James R. Stoner, Louisiana State University "Justin Buckley Dyer's Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition illuminates the disharmony in the American constitutional order between the political creed of equality and the tragic fact of slavery. Dyer makes a provocative case for rooting antislavery aspirations within the logic of American constitutionalism. In doing so, he gives us a conflicted understanding of American constitutional development; and yet an understanding rooted in-and at times driven by- substantive principles that underpin the constitutional order. The result is an account of constitutional development that is at once an improvement upon Whiggish visions of constitutional progress and a challenge to current scholarship that shrugs, indifferently, at constitutional aspirations."-George Thomas, Claremont McKenna College