The Distribution of Political Faith

The original title of Constitutional Redemption—which my publisher prevailed on me not to use—was “Agreements with Hell.” The phrase comes from a famous statement of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—himself drawing on the words of the prophet Isaiah—that the United States Constitution was “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” By agreeing to protect slavery, the Framers had embedded evil in the constitutional system, and Garrison believed that the only remedy for this original sin of constitutionalism was to dissolve the Union, and for the North to secede from the South