This dissertation examines the emergence and political significance of the antebellum agricultural reform movement in order to investigate how economic change structured party realignment in the decade before the Civil War. It focuses attention on a critical yet almost ignored constituency of the period, northeastern farmers, showing why they would steadfastly support a Republican Party typically associated with manufacturers. Second, it uncovers the roots of one of our most powerful and enduring special interest groups--the agricultural lobby--demonstrating its powerful impact on federal policy as early as the antebellum period. It thus sheds new light on the causes of sectional conflict and on the course of American state development in the 1800s.

At midcentury the rural Northeast faced a four-fold challenge: (1) depleted soils resulting from over-cropping; (2) western competition in grains; (3) steady out-migration; and (4) increasingly virulent pest infestations. Agricultural reformers responded by arguing for a modernized "scientific agriculture" that would reinvigorate the northeastern countryside. The new farming would be intensive, sustainable, and profitable, its practitioners both market and technology savvy. In order to offset western advantage in grains, reformers urged northeastern farmers to specialize in hay, wool and perishables for nearby urban centers. In order to increase production, they urged the adoption of commercial fertilizers, rational bookkeeping practices, and other innovations.

I argue that as northeastern farmers shifted toward more capital intensive crop production for domestic markets, they forged an alliance with nascent American manufactures. Ideologically, this alliance was sustained by a vision of mutual reciprocity between town and country that promised rural modernization within a rubric of overall national growth. Practically, its substance was state aid for domestic economic development. Agricultural reformers lobbied vigorously for federal institutions such as land grant colleges and the Department of Agriculture while manufacturers demanded a protective tariff. Such claims on the federal government brought both groups into increasing conflict with southern slaveholders, who feared that any expansion in federal domestic functions portended danger for slavery. Consequently, agricultural reformers and manufacturers were drawn into the Republican Party's antislavery cause as a way to break southern power in Washington.

Based on print and manuscript sources from across the Northeast, the dissertation integrates histories of party politics, commercial agriculture, education, the environment, and science and technology, to show how rural northeasterners organized themselves in order to demand that state and national governments help them prosper in a rapidly changing economy. These demands not only influenced the immediate course of American politics toward the Civil War, but helped define long-term processes of state formation by initiating a matrix of state and federal agencies that by the early twentieth century reached into virtually every rural county in the country.

This dissertation reintegrates abolitionism into the main currents of U.S. political history. Because of a bifurcation between studies of the American antislavery movement and political histories of the sectional conflict, modern scholars have drastically underestimated the significance of abolitionist political activism. Historians often characterize political abolitionists as naïve idealists or separatist moral purists, but I recast them as practical, effective politicians, who capitalized on rare openings in American political institutions to achieve outsized influence in the face of a robust two-party system. Third-party abolitionists shaped national debate far beyond their numbers and played central roles in the emergence of the Republican Party.

Over the second half of the 1830s, political abolitionists devised the Slave Power concept, claiming that slaveholder control of the federal government endangered American democracy; this would later become the Republicans' most important appeal. Integrating this argument with an institutional analysis of the Second Party System, antislavery activists assailed the Whigs and Democrats--cross-sectional parties that incorporated antislavery voices while supporting proslavery policies--as beholden to the Slave Power. This analysis thus provided the rationale for creation of the abolitionist Liberty Party and then became its chief rhetorical tool.

Liberty partisans cast all elections as contests against the Slave Power and repeatedly forced slavery into political debate by controlling balances of power in many northern locales. Meanwhile, they developed a sophisticated lobbying strategy to exploit Congress as a public forum that could be made to magnify and widely disseminate the Slave Power argument. As northern Whigs and Democrats faced new antislavery electoral pressures and chafed under the Slave Power's increasing exactions, Liberty leaders redoubled their efforts to pry antislavery dissidents from the major parties. In the process Liberty men paved the way for a broader anti-Slave Power coalition and helped found the Free Soil Party in 1848. A small but dedicated Free Soil congressional bloc then built on Liberty tactics to further harness congressional debate as a platform for dramatizing the Slave Power's control of national policymaking. When the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act roused northern voters and deranged once-stable party allegiances, Free Soil leaders in and out of Congress seized on the opportunity to spearhead a party uniting all opponents of the Slave Power. In helping propel this new Republican Party to northern preeminence by 1856, erstwhile Liberty men and Free Soilers finally foresaw the end of the Slave Power's national supremacy, and, ultimately, of slavery itself.

The Founding casts a long shadow over American life. Laden with cultural authority, the creation story of the United States Constitution figures prominently across public discourse, jurisprudence and historical scholarship. But the origins of this investment in original understandings, founding principles and framers’ visions do not. This dissertation asks when, why and how this popular and juridical commitment to the constitutional Founding arose. It finds answers in antebellum America’s searing conflicts over the future of slavery. It argues that as adversarial publics contested slavery’s temporal and territorial boundaries, they refashioned the Constitution into an imagined archive. Grasping for greater authority and dispositive settlements, they invoked visions ascribed to venerated national fathers and sought to enforce imputed original meanings beyond the words of the document. Americans litigated slavery’s future through their invention of a binding, revered and conclusive constitutional past. Providing a new history of constitutionalism from the early national period through Reconstruction, this dissertation traces how Americans produced, deployed and experienced the authority of the Founding around the central trauma of the age.

The first chapter depicts the post-Ratification world of public constitutional discourse before U.S. constitutional history ruled – before the genre even existed. In contrast, the following two chapters depict a transformation of vernacular constitutionalism and the construction of the Founding between the impasse over Missouri statehood and Nullification Crisis. The fourth chapter analyzes the everyday materials of constitutional learning that trained white Americans to revere and defer to the Founding, a posture central to antebellum constitutionalism. The fifth chapter examines the experiences of black Americans – free, fugitive and enslaved – as well as radical abolitionists as they variously defied the venerative consensus demanded by dominant constitutional culture. The sixth and seventh chapters consider the arena of formal law; they show how the authority of the Founding swept into courtrooms as a legitimating power, one that courts exercised aggressively but could not fully control. Turning to popular politics and government policy, the eighth chapter demonstrates how specific narratives about slavery at the Founding structured the unfolding sectional crisis. The Civil War broke open the Founding that had long constrained antislavery possibilities, and living Americans remade their Constitution after sixty years of textual stasis. As the epilogue argues, however, the Founding rose again to elide Reconstruction and sustain white reconciliation.

This dissertation expands U.S. constitutional history as a field and an object of study. Venturing deep into the everyday forums of constitutional life, it approaches the authority of the Founding as a question rather than a predicate to make two novel contributions to our understanding of slavery and law in the nineteenth century. First, by demonstrating new dimensions of slavery’s influence on political and legal life, it rewrites traditional chronologies of American constitutional development, yielding a sobering answer to the question of how citizens came to cherish their Constitution. In turn, the nexus of slavery and constitutionalism in this answer develops underrealized dimensions of the genesis of the Civil War. Second, in tracing how people reimagined the Constitution as an archive of promises about slavery, the dissertation exposes an epistemic transformation in how Americans perceived the nature and scope of the Constitution itself. This analysis raises a new model of popular constitutionalism characterized by deference to imagined, contested pasts. By studying authority instead of party-aligned disputes, it also shows an alternative way for historians and legal scholars to locate American constitutionalism in historical time. Finally, the dissertation tells a story of the Founding that speaks to our present. It studies how Americans claim the past and hold opposing truths; and it suggests that the allure and authority of original meanings cannot be separated from the United States’ history of slavery and racialized tyranny.