The University of Akron IdeaExchange@UAkron Akron Law Review Akron Law Journals July 2015 Teaching Slavery in American Constitutional Law Paul Finkelman Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Follow this and additional works at: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, and the Law and Race Commons Recommended Citation Finkelman, Paul (2001) "Teaching Slavery in American Constitutional Law," Akron Law Review: Vol. 34 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol34/iss1/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Akron Law Journals at IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The nivU ersity of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Akron Law Review by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. Finkelman: Teaching Slavery in Constitutional Law TEACHING SLAVERY IN AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW by Paul Finkelman* From 1787 until the Civil War, slavery was probably the single most important economic institution in the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, slave property was worth at least two billion dollars.1 In the aggregate, the value of all the slaves in the United States exceeded the total value of all the nations railroads or all its factories. Slavery led to two major political compromises of the antebellum period,2 as well as to the most politically divisive Supreme Court decision in our history.3 Vast amounts of political and legal energy went into dealing with the institution.