Roughly five hundred pages into the book, Lepore quotes the actor Jimmy Stewart to deliver a final, and what seems to me a more persuasive, reason for writing These Truths. Stewart was in a 1941 radio play on the Bill of Rights not surprisingly entitled We Hold These Truths. He proclaimed that "Congress . . . threw up a bulwark, wrote a hope, and made a sign for posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race-haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists, the men who give up the fights that have just begun" (p. 491). Lepore's book concerns the origin and fate of the supposed bulwark, and her targets—both explicit and implicit—are those Stewart railed against.
Stewart's speech was about as nuanced as It's a Wonderful Life, but like that movie, the sentiment of the speech has legs and deserves respect. Still, good causes do not necessarily produce good histories. The quality of the book depends on how Lepore's techniques, research, evidence, and plot both structure and support the story she tells.
Lepore begins These Truths with an "American book of Genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain" (p. 38). There were "two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won." (p. 76). She places the political revolution and the struggle against slavery on adjacent tracks that converge in the Civil War. Slavery is at the heart of These Truths. This focus paradoxically is the book's great strength, and it bares the book's analytical deficiencies.
In her account ideas produce other ideas. Equality and inequality, liberty and slavery are ideas that arise in reaction to one another. She argues that "the idea of equality came out of the resolute rejection of the idea of inequality; a dedication to liberty emerged out of a bitter protest against slavery . . ." (p. 10). But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas. More critically, slavery was not just an idea, it was a practice, a system of violence, an "everyday atrocity" as Lepore says, that degraded, maimed, and killed millions of human beings. Ideas get us only so far. They are abstract and pure while practices are material and messy. As ideas, Lepore can pit freedom against slavery, but when her story arc depends on a stark division between a "slavery party," and a "free party," things fall apart (p. 176). Her "free party" elides into an abolition party. But the longstanding scholarly consensus is that there were two different strands of anti-slavery: abolition, a minority position until the Civil War, and a much larger anti-slavery movement whose adherents were often as racist as slaveholders and who objected to slavery's expansion more than its existence. It was the attempt to expand slavery into the West that ignited anti-slavery resistance and precipitated the Civil War. Not ideas but flawed and selfish people acting with mixed motives forced the end of slavery.
When we reinsert the history of anti-slavery alongside the history of abolition, the story changes and Lepore's account becomes vulnerable. Lepore wants her Abel to be pure liberty, not the compromised practice of antislavery. She focuses on Quaker, New England, and African-American abolitionists and neglects the far more numerous advocates of anti-slavery. This makes her always Northeast-centric narrative even more so. The struggle over the Wilmot proviso and shutting the West to slavery quickly turns to Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass. John Brown at Harper's Ferry rather than Bleeding Kansas becomes central to her story. She keeps things simple.
