There’s no doubt that Australian law professor Peter Radan breaks new ground in his book “Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union.” The question, however, is what we are to make of it. I understood going in that Radan would argue that "on the basis of American constitutional law in 1860–1861, the unilateral secessions of the Confederate states were lawful," on the grounds that the United States was forged as a "slaveholders’ Union.” I was fully willing to accept that.
It's hardly a new argument. Legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison famously denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with death, an agreement with hell." But it's also true that Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison, arguing that the Constitution made slavery illegitimate — and ironically enough, given today’s environment, made that argument on textualist and originalist grounds. I was eager to learn what Radan would make of the widely divergent views on this topic — and, alas, I was sorely disappointed.
