| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David L. Lightner. Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 228. $45.00.
During the antebellum era, many profound, intractable problems divided the North and South, but most of the conflict leading up to the U.S. Civil War centered on the question of slavery. The expansion of slavery, fugitive slaves, the morality and humanity of slavery, and the slave trade were flash points in the polarization of the two regions. David L. Lightner provides a brief overview of the role the interstate slave trade played in the conflict and argues that it was "an important element in precipitating the secession crises and the Civil War" (p. xi).	1
Lightner begins with a description of the great magnitude of the interstate slave trade, how it operated, and the painful and devastating consequences it held for enslaved African Americans. In chapter two Lightner discusses what the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention intended when they drew up the "1808 clause" and "commerce clause" (p. 17). Despite the various arguments the author considers, it is clear that the delegates were mainly concerned with protecting the individual states' right to import foreign slaves when they adopted the 1808 clause. The commerce clause poses more problems, but Lightner's view that the delegates did not contemplate the interstate slave trade when they approved the measure makes sense. If they had, it is likely that most of the southern delegates would have insisted that the interstate trade be protected from federal interference. Nevertheless, the commerce clause became law, and, according to Lightner, over time many in the North and South came to believe that this "constitutional loophole" could be used to ban the interstate slave trade and eventually destroy slavery itself (p. 36).	. . .

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