War & Peace Quote by Jay Alan Sekulow

There’s a lawyerly trapdoor in Sekulow’s phrasing: the line isn’t mainly about slavery, it’s about jurisdiction. By insisting “we can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time,” he frames emancipation not as moral awakening but as a rare procedural opening - a wartime window where extraordinary federal power can do what peacetime federalism supposedly can’t. The word “extirpate” is doing cold work here: it’s clinical, almost surgical, replacing righteous abolition with the logic of excision. That choice makes the argument feel less like protest and more like a brief.

The subtext is a wager on inevitability. Sekulow sets up a stark binary: act now under the Constitution, or later be forced into complicity “unless we intend hereafter to violate the Constitution.” That’s a deliberate inversion of the usual critique of abolition as radical or lawless. Here, refusing to end slavery becomes the real constitutional breach, because the postwar legal order will snap back to enforcing property claims. The fugitive slave law isn’t raised as a historical artifact; it’s a symbol of restoration - the nightmare of normalcy returning.

Context matters: this is not a 19th-century voice but a contemporary conservative legal figure adopting Civil War-era stakes to argue that emergency powers can permanently reshape rights. The rhetoric borrows abolition’s urgency while smuggling in a broader lesson: in American politics, “constitutional” often means “who controls the moment,” and wartime is when the rules are most pliable.