Read in good faith, these arguments reflect an older consensus about the historiography of the early American republic. For those historians, working through the 20th century, slavery was a secondary part of the story of the American Revolution, with only modest influence on the shape and structure of the Constitution. It’s not that they didn’t recognize slavery as an important part of American society, or were unaware of contemporaneous critique of the founding generation (like Samuel Johnson’s famous quip in 1775’s “Taxation No Tyranny” asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”), but that slavery was a parenthetical in their story of the founding.

There is, however, a competing narrative that puts slavery at the center of constitutional debate and ties white racism to the revolutionary project. I want to talk about two recent entries in this literature: “Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification,” by the historian David Waldstreicher, and “The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution,” by the historian Robert G. Parkinson.

The popular narrative of the American Revolution depicts a colonial population united in frustration and anger with Britain. But the history is more complicated — it always is. “Patriot leaders had a momentous task of narration in the days after Lexington,” Parkinson notes. “Not only did they have to convince a majority of colonists that their cultural cousins were now their mortal enemies; they had to make such an appeal using arguments that all could agree on.” With one hand, they appealed to common values — of liberty and equality. With the other, they defined an enemy. They “valorized white citizen soldiers for defending freedom and castigated those who opposed it.” They gave “new republican valence” to longstanding prejudices against enslaved Africans and Native Americans. “Through hundreds of stories told and retold, published and republished, in weekly patriot newspapers, the first construction of what it meant to be an American meant the diametric opposite of merciless savages or domestic insurrectionists.”

In their effort to construct a singular American people, the patriots attached new meaning to whiteness, conflating it with reason, with freedom, with citizenship. Thousands of blacks and Native peoples fought for a revolution whose architects excluded them as members of the new polity.

[For another view, read Bret Stephens’s column, “America the Beautiful.”]

Then there’s the Constitution. In his book, Waldstreicher asks readers to hold two ideas in their minds simultaneously. First, that the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution produced a sincere politics of antislavery. Vermont, for example, eliminated slavery in its 1777 Constitution, and Pennsylvania introduced gradual emancipation in 1780. In Virginia, where 40 percent of the population was enslaved, some planters freed their slaves. Even Thomas Jefferson, as a member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, proposed a ban on slaves in the western territories after 1800. It failed by a single vote. Americans were conflicted on how blacks would fit into their new republic, but a growing number could not reconcile the rhetoric of liberty with the practice of bondage.