Politics is a moral issue

A third into the book, I remind myself of the question that Jill Lepore set up for herself and for readers like me:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The evidence thus far does not make the American experiment look good.

In fact, it seems like the experiment gets worse by the page!

The more the North attacked slavery, the more the South defended "their way of life."  More and more compromises were made, in the name of saving the Union.  Morals be damned!

The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Turn in the runaway slaves?  "These truths"?

Enter Abraham Lincoln.

The 45-year old Lincoln came "out of his law practice and back into politics."  And, "he found a political home in a new political party, the Republican Party, founded in May 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin."

Jill Lepore writes that Lincoln despaired about "what he described as the nation's "progress in degeneracy," a political regression":

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are equal."  We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes."

Lincoln couldn' make serious inroads.  Yet.

In 1857, President Buchanan was sworn in, and dismissed the importance of the slavery issue.

Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

How awful that the president of the United States did not think that slavery was of pressing and practical importance, leave alone the moral aspects of treating fellow humans as property!

It then comes down to the truths.  If the Constitution and the American experiment rests on three political ideas--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people--then, "does the Constitution sanction slavery or not?"

The US Supreme Court settled it, atrociously, in the Dred Scott case, in which the 7-2 majority ruled that ""no negro of the African race " could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States."

Frederick Douglass thundered, as he always did:

Slavery lies in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.

Or, to use the words of the current president, there were fine people on both sides!

A Civil War was inevitable.