Historian's Take -- NRO
. . . That Wilentz’s book is explicitly an examination of the antislavery politics of Congress, which necessarily involved exploring “debates among white elites,” is never considered. Ultimately, Guyatt claims, Fredrick Douglass and others were “acting not as historians, but as activists” when they expressed an antislavery constitutionalism. “Wilentz, while approaching us as the former,” Guyatt laments, “is as much the latter as any of his subjects.”
