Paul Finkelman is a distinguished historian and legal scholar specializing in American legal history, constitutional law, and race and the law. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than 40 books.

Preface to the Third Edition
1. Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery and the Constitutional Convention
2. Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance, 1787: A Study in Ambiguity
3. Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois
4. Implementing the Proslavery Constitution: The Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793
5. Ending the African Slave Trade in the New Nation
6. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism
7. "Treason Against the Hopes of the World": Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
8. Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Antislavery: Historians and Myths
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman addresses a central issue of the American founding: how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. The book explores the tension between the professed idea of America as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of the early American republic, reminding us of the profound and disturbing ways that slavery affected the U.S. Constitution and early American politics. It also offers the most important and detailed short critique of Thomas Jefferson's relationship to slavery available, while at the same time contrasting his relationship to slavery with that of other founders. This third edition of Slavery and the Founders incorporates a new chapter on the regulation and eventual (1808) banning of the African slave trade.