The Constitution is proslavery and “an agreement with hell.”(p.ix) Paul Finkelman opens his account of slavery and the founders promoting this thesis on the very first page of his book, and does so unequivocally. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol.
History 583. 13, No. Slavery and the Founders is a tedious book, but now in its third edition, it has become a minor classic. The author, Paul Finkelman, is a law professor, and the book reads like a brief for the centrality of slavery in the early American republic and for the racism and hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson. John Fowler. October 26, 2006 Précis: Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, Paul Finkelman. Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. Finkelman, Paul, The Founders and Slavery: Little Ventured, Little Gained (2001). New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. He received his undergraduate degree in American studies from Syracuse University in 1971, and his master's degree (1972) and doctorate (1976) in American history from the University of Chicago. This third edition of Slavery and the Founders, with its provocative new chapter on ending the African Slave Trade, weaves together the complex motivations of the Revolutionary generation, both its proslavery and antislavery representatives, into a tightly argued narrative. 2, 2001.