Slavery, Equality, and the American Revolution

This is a timely and thought-provoking exploration, marking America's 250th anniversary, of how the American Revolution both perpetuated slavery and sowed the seeds of its abolition, as leading legal scholars trace the Declaration of Independence's promise of human equality through Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the 14th Amendment, illuminating the founding's contested legacy on race, natural rights, federalism, and the path to a "new birth of freedom."

Featuring original essays by Randy E. Barnett, Kurt T. Lash, Lucas E. Morel, Justin Driver, and Diana Schaub. 

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the nation’s founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. 

The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. 

In the fifth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists discuss how the American Revolution both perpetuated slavery and created the conditions for its abolition. While hundreds of thousands of African Americans remained enslaved at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality galvanized slavery’s opponents and laid the groundwork for increasingly egalitarian definitions of American citizenship. 

Considering how the Declaration shaped antislavery thinkers and politicians such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and informed the 14th Amendment demonstrates how the American Revolution enabled a “new birth of freedom” in the 19th century.

Randy E. Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and faculty director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He is the coauthor of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (2021).

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the author of, among other books, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (2018).

Kurt T. Lash is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Richmond and the founder and director of the Richmond Program on the American Constitution. He is the author of, among numerous other books, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities of American Citizenship (2014).

Lucas E. Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr., Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of Lincoln and the American Founding (2020), among other books, and is a member of the US Semiquincentennial Commission.

Diana Schaub is professor emerita of political science at Loyola University Maryland and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is a visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. Her latest book is His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation (2021).