Political Theory Institute Lecture: "Constitutions Ancient and Novel: Slavery, Race, and the Meanings of 1776"

Racial slavery, we often say, is the original sin of the American republic. But this metaphor is more historically true than we realize. Sarah Marsh argues that American racial slavery, and the American concept of race itself, grew out of seventeenth-century England's great constitutional struggle between the divine right of kings and the immemorial liberties of the English people's "ancient constitution." In England's western Atlantic colonies, English slaveholders reenacted the Stuart kings' fall from grace: they sought to be like God, claiming absolute power over other human beings. Tracing this conflict from England's Civil Wars to the Declaration of Independence, Marsh asks a question that still animates American public life: was the United States founded in freedom, or in slavery—in 1776, or in 1619?

Featured Speaker:

Sarah Marsh is an Associate Professor of English, and Director of Curriculum Development for Setonian Mission at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania. Professor Marsh studies anglophone literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, with focus on the western Atlantic history of race, slavery, and antislavery. Her research interests also include medical humanities, law and literature, and the history of the novel. Professor Marsh’s students engage with core humanities texts—from Plato and Saint Augustine to Jane Austen and Frederick Douglass—to explore what it means to be human. By reading these works with charity and in a wisdom-seeking spirit, her students learn to cultivate a life of the mind as a resource for human flourishing.