Paul Kalra
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 303
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In From Slave to Untouchable: Lincoln's Solution, class system scholar Paul Kalra challenges the assumption that the Civil War was fought to end black slavery. He asserts that civil war could have been avoided had early Americans adopted the Catholic slave code, which recognized slaves' humanity. Instead, he traces slavery in the U.S. to the Protestant slave code, which created distinct classes of slaveholders and non-slaveholders, and denied black slaves citizenship. It was primarily slaveholders-the wealthiest, most powerful class in pre-Civil War America, who framed the undemocratic Constitution to secure their economic and political advantages. As immigrants flooded the "free" North, the South's political advantage dwindled, and slavery endangered the nation's economic balance. Lincoln's election translated to the South's loss of power and the inevitability of Civil War. Kalra weaves an impressive array of perspectives into his well-crafted story, and concludes by demonstrating that the legacy of the slaveholders' self-serving Constitution persists today, rendering blacks in America an essentially "untouchable" class.