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About the Presentation
Salmon P. Chase’s antislavery constitutionalism began from the premise that the Declaration of Independence was the nation’s true founding law. Its affirmation of natural, inalienable rights created a national presumption of liberty that shaped how the Constitution should be interpreted.
Because the Constitution avoided any recognition of “property in man” and referred only to “persons,” Chase argued that slavery existed solely by the positive law of individual states, never by national authority. From this, he maintained that Congress could restrict and even undermine slavery using its enumerated powers—barring it in the territories, abolishing it in the District of Columbia, halting the foreign and interstate slave trade, and refusing to nationalize slave-catching absent explicit constitutional authorization.
This view led Chase to his core principle: “Freedom is national; slavery is local.” The Declaration’s universal rights, he argued, meant that the federal government’s powers must be read to favor liberty unless the Constitution unmistakably required otherwise—which it did not. His reading later formed the backbone of the Free Soil and Republican programs to contain slavery and ultimately set it on the path to extinction.
By linking the Declaration’s rights-based philosophy to the Constitution’s text, Chase showed how antislavery constitutionalism prefigured the Reconstruction Amendments’ transformation of the nation into one fully aligned with its founding ideals.
About Randy Barnett
Randy E. Barnett is author of 14 books, including his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. He is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he is Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzeles v. Raich in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012 he represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its Challenge to Obamacare.
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, he divides his time between Central Virginia and Sarasota, Florida. His most recent book is Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, decribing the lessons he learned as a criminal prosecutor in Chicago.
In 2010, Professor Barnett portrayed a prosecutor in the sc-fi feature film Inalienable (which can be viewed for free on YouTube).