The Broken Constitution: The American Compromise

This is The Broken Constitution, a miniseries from Unknown History from Quick and Dirty Tips and Deep Background from Pushkin Industries. I'm Noah Feldman. Over the next three episodes, I'm going to talk about Abraham Lincoln and how he needed to break the Constitution in order to remake it. It's all based on my new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, out November 2. 

If you're listening to this podcast, you already know that one of the most important questions facing the United States today is whether racism and slavery are encoded into the DNA of the United States by virtue of being encoded into the Constitution. This question is behind debates about who we are, what we should teach, and what the possibilities are for our nation going into the future, especially with respect to racial equality. 

I wrote The Broken Constitution because I wanted to know the answer. I've devoted most of my professional life to thinking about the United States Constitution and about other Constitutions, whether in Iraq, Tunisia, or anywhere else around the world. I've written books about these documents and their legacies: about the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and about the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. 

When I started writing this book, I entered with three misconceptions: 

• That our Constitution functions as a higher moral law guiding us into the future. It does not.
• That we've always had the same Constitution since it was drafted in 1787. We have not.
• That Abraham Lincoln was the President who saved the U.S. Constitution. Lincoln didn't save the Constitution. He broke the Constitution--three separate times in three separate ways--in order to transform it into something new and different.

Over the course of this miniseries, I will devote one episode to each of these three misconceptions. I'll also tell you the story of Abraham Lincoln's own engagement with the Constitution and what it reveals about the Constitution itself. 

In this first episode, I will begin by describing the purpose of the original Constitution--up until the time that Lincoln assumed the Presidency...

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