Understanding contradictions in the US Constitution – and using them

Historian David Blight has an essay that wrestles with an aspect of how we build narratives about History, ‘A Doubtful Freedom’ New York Review of Books 01/16/2020

That the United States has been a “nation” since its founding - struggling through slavery, civil conflict, labor strife, economic depressions, and deep ethnic and racial divisions but still surviving as a single polity and people - has long been an article of faith in triumphal versions of our history. “We the People” have often needed a sense of our long continuity if we wished to hold ourselves together. A story, true and false, imagined or otherwise, with remembrance and a good deal of forgetting is perhaps the only thing that can unify a nation. Before he became president, Barack Obama inspired many of us with his clarion call in 2004 that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America.” In these recent polarized years we’ve seen bitter refutations of this premise, even as its noble impulse survives. Just now the idea of the American nation needs serious attention from historians. [my emphasis]

In the humanities, descriptions and accounts are often referred to as "narratives," which in modern speech philosophy like that of Jürgen Habermas are recognized as being the products of a social process.

With the history of nations, including American history, the narratives of academic professionals inevitably co-exist with political and sentimental narratives in popular usage. The controversies over Confederate symbolism are examples of that difference, since the serious historical accounts generally diverge greatly from political understandings of the moment that use historical images and memories to construct narratives for current political purposes.

Blight is reviewing a book by Andrew Delbanco that looks at how the fugitive slave issue affected the conflict between slave and free states, The War Before the War (2018).

Here he comments on the contradictory concepts incorporated into the Constitution and how democratic activists could base their arguments in part on the more democratic and liberal current of the American

At the same time, today we need the reminder that the nature of federalism — the attempted balancing of state and federal power — at the heart of the Constitution is itself rooted in the protection of slavery. Our ongoing struggle over states’ rights owes much to its origins in Madison’s and other founders’ insistence on local control of their chattel in moral persons.

Whether this was a matter of principle or politics for Madison may be beside the point. Delbanco shows how the Constitution’s main author embodied the contradiction at the same time that he may have provided later abolitionists a means to harness, rather than only condemn, the founding document. Many, especially Frederick Douglass, did just that, hoping to get the authority of the Bill of Rights and the plea for a “more perfect union” on the side of the antislavery cause. We have never stopped arguing about whether the Constitution was fundamentally proslavery - in effectively sustaining the system - or whether it contained antislavery elements that were revealed over time. What we do know is that eventually a strong segment of political abolitionists forged an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution that energized the original Republican Party and helped foment disunion. [my emphasis]

It's also a fact that the US Constitution was ratified in 1788. It has been amended various times since then. But as we see in the current Trump impeachment debate, how contemporary political actors interpret the intentions of the Founders has not only a theoretical but practical relevance. And the precedents of constitutional law also date from the beginning of the Constitution.