No Property in Man – Slavery and antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz

This book’s focus is on how the framers of the Constitution went to great lengths not to use the word slave or slavery in the textual language and avoid implying in any way that the Constitution endorsed the concept of humans as property. It then explores how the vagaries of that language spawned different interpretations of the Constitutional and how that played out over the next 70 plus years culminating in the civil war.