About

Aaron Hall is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. He is a legal historian specializing in colonial America and the early United States, with a focus on the entangled subjects of slavery, constitutionalism, and governance from the Revolution through Reconstruction. His research includes a forthcoming book titled "The Founding Rules: Slavery and the Creation of American Constitutionalism, 1789-1889," which explores how Americans developed a constitutional culture rooted in narratives of original meaning amidst struggles over slavery and state power, offering a deep account of the origins of originalism. Currently, he is working on a new project examining American slavery as a 'public institution'—a regime of governance where private rule was maintained and limited by layers of state authority. His scholarly work also encompasses topics such as inter-governmental arrests under federalism, property insurance and private violence, local election disputes, and the history of state natural history cabinets. Prior to his current position, he was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. Hall holds a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA in History and Political Science from Amherst College.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Ancient history
• Biotechnology
• Biology
• History
• Food science
• Environmental health
• Agricultural economics
• Natural resource economics
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Business
• Social psychology
• Economics

Selected publications

• Lindsay M. Chervinsky. <i>Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic</i>

  The American Historical Review · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South

  Journal of American History · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On Constitutional Romance and Federalisms Long Forgotten: A Review Essay

  American Journal of Legal History · 2024-06-01

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History

  Journal of American History · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • History

  Journal Article Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History Get access Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History. By Emily Pears. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. xii, 300 pp. $39.95.) Aaron Hall Aaron Hall Minneapolis, Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 3, December 2023, Pages 544–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad283 Published: 01 December 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Making meat and milk from plants: A review of plant-based food for human and planetary health

  World Development · 2023 · 78 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Biotechnology
  • Food science

  Interest in alternative protein sources to substitute for animal source protein-rich foods has emerged alongside calls for sustainable food systems to meet protein demands as the global population grows towards a projected 9.8 billion people by 2050. Food companies are capitalizing on sustainable diet recommendations that encourage consumption of plant-based foods and have heavily invested in new plant-based foods that mimic animal source foods, effectively expanding the “plant-based foods” category. At the same time, globally there are two opposing protein transitions taking place as lower-income populations shift from plant to animal protein sources and higher-income populations that overconsume animal protein sources are recommended to shift towards plant-based foods. Using a global food systems lens, this review article builds on existing literature to assess the extent to which plant-based meat and milk analogs can become part of sustainable diets across two competing protein transitions and to identify unresolved knowledge gaps. This articles first examines global meat and dairy consumption trends as well as the emergence of plant-based analogs and consumer perceptions. We then draw on the literature to compare the environmental footprints and nutrition compositions of plant-based meats and milks against their respective conventional equivalents. We find that, while there are promising environmental benefits to substituting meats and milk with certain plant-based analogs, the uptake of these products is likely stifled based on the small number of products they mimic (i.e., ground meat, meat emulsions, meat crumbles, and fluid milk). Further, plant-based analogs do not completely mimic the nutrient composition of animal source foods. Plant-based analogs may have improved compositions, such as improved fat profiles. However, analogs may lack comparable protein and micronutrients that are highly bioavailable in animal source foods. Care should be considered for plant-based analogs that inherently fall under the “plant- based food” category as they are vastly different from whole and minimally processed plant foods and the intended benefits of plant-based food consumption may not be generalizable. Future assessments of meat and milk analogs should consider under which contexts direct substitution of animal source foods are viable from a consumer standpoint and examine both environment and nutrition impacts that are important to the given population.

  PublisherDOI

• No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding by Sean Wilentz

  Journal of the Early Republic · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Reviewed by: No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding by Sean Wilentz Aaron R. Hall (bio) Keywords Slavery, Antislavery, U.S. Constitution, Constitutional Convention, Abolition, Secession No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding. By Sean Wilentz. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 350. Cloth, $26.95.) The text of the U.S. Constitution did not spell out the word "slave" prior to the Reconstruction Amendments. Nor did its first framers adopt a human-chattel clause guaranteeing a national right to own people. As James Madison self-reported in his posthumously published "Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787," it would be "wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."1 This well-known constitutional absence (and quotation) has hardly troubled a scholarly consensus on the proslavery force of the framers' handiwork. The numerical incorporation of enslaved people in slave-state federal representation, provision for rendition of interstate fugitives from slavery, protection of the transatlantic slave trade, and promise of military might against insurrections showed that the Convention could ably weave slavery into the national fabric without saying its name. As soft antislavery sentiments yielded to hard bargaining behind closed doors, the Constitution embedded southern states in a robust federal polity and empowered their slaveholding leaders to govern. Sean Wilentz sees a more inspiring Founding in the words that framers declined to use. No Property in Man, a short and sweeping account of slavery's constitutional place from the Revolution through Emancipation, [End Page 388] presents Wilentz's vision of the original meaning and subsequent power of the textual absence of "slave." The Princeton historian insists that a majority in the Convention hewed assiduously to his book's titular principle, making good on Madison's remark, even as they framed architecture strengthening the enslavement of those designated as "other persons."2 As Wilentz puts it: "While they had no choice in the moment but to tolerate and even protect slavery where it existed, they would prepare for a nation in which there was no slavery, which would mean refusing to validate slavery's legitimacy in the Constitution" (59). This conscious refusal, undertaken not to obscure slavery but to deny it any constitutional sanction, laid the cornerstone of abolition. Wilentz's framers "left room" (2) for antislavery politics and "bequeathed grounds upon which slavery's expansion would later be challenged, with the ultimate objective of destroying American slavery completely" (22). All this rendered the Constitution a "paradox," not a compact with hell (22). And it explains why Wilentz laments that "historians still cling to [abolitionist William Lloyd] Garrison's denunciation" of the instrument as such (12). Because the Constitution's original meaning—something he largely treats as defined by authorial understanding—withheld recognition of slavery, later generations of antislavery constitutionalists stood on the right side of historical truth while proslavery interpretations defied the framers' will. Before the Civil War, Wilentz contends, Abraham Lincoln "closely studied Madison's notes" (254) and "sensed how the framers … offered his generation the instruments to cut out what he called the 'cancer' of slavery" (242). Secession followed his election because slaveholders could not endure a government that vindicated the Constitution's antislavery silence. At its heart, then, No Property in Man seeks to exorcise from contemporary historians the ghost of Garrison—as well as those of proslavery figures John Calhoun and Roger Taney, whose constitutional understandings Wilentz asserts rested on the same false notion of the Founding. This is a book thick with arguments. It tells of Revolutionary-era discourse against slavery, debates in the Convention, heated analysis advanced during ratification, and claims levied amid decades of political conflict over slavery; and it is replete with Wilentz's strong interpretive voice across these moments. No Property in Man convincingly foregrounds the importance of constitutional positions in configuring formal [End Page 389] politics that culminated in secession. It shows how passing time and new sectional issues collided with original choices. Its tight focus on arguments about the constitutional recognition of enslaved people as property yields a particularly lucid approach for linking together issues and fights over half a...

  PublisherDOI

• Public Slaves and State Engineers: Modern Statecraft on Louisiana's Waterways, 1833–1861

  The Journal of Southern History · 2019-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Public Slaves and State Engineers:Modern Statecraft on Louisiana's Waterways, 1833–1861 Aaron R. Hall (bio) On June 9, 1860, seventy-nine men in New Orleans formally left the service of the Internal Improvement Department of the state of Louisiana. Among their ranks were two engineers, four blacksmiths, three pilots, three carpenters, two cooks, and ten boatmates. These public servants had come from clearing the bayous and rivers that drew Louisiana together. Operating steam-powered snagging boats, they had long tended the hydraulic seams of the state, circulating from southern sugar parishes out to the cotton frontier. The men had labored for an official vision of Louisiana's general welfare, ensuring the movement of staples, people, and information. As the state's chief engineer explained, through their exertions the department had pursued its "principal duty … to free the navigable streams of the State of all the natural obstructions which impede their navigation, and thus furnish easy water communication, to the trade, commerce and travel of every section of the State." Some men had spent more than two decades making the state from the riverbed, shoreline, and ground up. In New Orleans, they passed through bustling streets to reach the City Hotel. Citizens gathered around. Then onlookers placed bids, executed notes, and departed owning seventy-nine newly acquired slaves. Louisiana had privatized its "public hands."1 "I attended the sale of the State negroes today," recorded Alexander F. Pugh, noting his kin "bought three of them." Auctioneers collected [End Page 531] $74,000 in fulfillment of the "Act Providing for the sale of the Slaves belonging to the Internal Improvement Department of the State." These men made up most of a "State force" that had often exceeded one hundred people since the mid-1830s. The government kept eight skilled slaves—four engineers and four firemen. Another five people purchased by legislator and future Confederate governor Henry W. Allen remained in public service, and Louisiana canceled his note. Buoyant prices for enslaved people and the enslaved men's expertise redounded to Louisiana's benefit. Pugh observed that the men "sold very high, considering that they were greatly advanced in years and were not guaranteed." First in extracted labor and finally in cash conversion, the state's direct investment in slavery yielded returns to the white commonweal and public fisc. After years of motion compelled by lawmakers, superintendents, and communities of white constituents, the enslaved men were dispersed via eager bidders in the marketplace. From the City Hotel auction block, the department slaves heard their capacities extolled and their injuries elided. In the crowd that assembled to price bodies and calculate returns, the men saw the citizen-beneficiaries of the state they had built.2 Between 1834 and 1861, Louisiana was a slave master. As constituted through popular elections and republican institutions, the state purchased men by legislative deliberation and executive action. Across partisan elections and fiscal crises, Louisiana required these men to work, live, and occasionally perish for the state. State legislators, governors, commissioners, engineers, and superintendents dispatched the enslaved workforce with boats and machinery to extend a riverine network for the steamboat age. Being a slave-master state was a collective, democratic project for Louisiana's enfranchised white public, who exercised their political power to sustain the program and receive its benefits. The project rested on planters and communities who petitioned for the labor, on slaveholding representatives who perpetuated the [End Page 532] system, and on administrators who managed the daily practices of enslavement. The system was a mainstay of public policy. It carried out territorial integration suited to Louisiana's environmental conditions and political economy. State officials wielded the "public hands"—their strength, intellect, health, and knowledge—as instruments of statecraft to improve communication, to open lands, and to increase wealth. With limited manpower and fiscal resources, the system converted clogged bayous into navigable waterways, enabling planters' slaves to turn waterlogged prairies into profitable cane and cotton fields.3 The operation of this internal improvement system opens up an unfamiliar history of American state-building through state slavery. The program represented a government of slaveholders grasping at the institution's developmental potential. At the confluence...

  PublisherDOI

• Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South

  Journal of American History · 2019-03-08 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing.” —James Baldwin “The American Dream and the American Negro,” New York Times, March 7, 1965. The slaveholder Norborne Powell's frustrations were public knowledge around Macon, Georgia, in April 1832. As the spring days warmed and lengthened, Peter Johnson had slipped away to find his wife. Meanwhile, Tom seemed to have found illicit employment aboard a passing cotton boat. Handy had made for the coast, and “shrewd” London's whereabouts remained a mystery. These runaway slaves' defiance lay plainly on the pages of the Macon (Ga) Telegraph. Powell soon added an advertisement for Denis, suspected of a marital visit or otherwise “lurking about.” In activating community surveillance, Powell was not another indignant planter stumbling over his slaves' resistance; he also served as superintendent of public hands for the western division of Georgia. The missing men, along with scores of slaves laboring under his purview, were public property. This administrative posture lay behind the warning that Powell, a prospering planter in private life, issued against “harboring, employing, trafficking or trading with the public hands,” flagrant “abuses of the public interest” that he vowed to stop. The superintendent's demand that “good citizens of the State … co-operate” carried authority beyond the slaveholder's personal stature. Georgia's slaves were everyone's concern.1

  PublisherDOI

• “Plant Yourselves on its Primal Granite”: Slavery, History and the Antebellum Roots of Originalism

  Law and History Review · 2019-07-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay considers how the cultural authority of the constitutional Founding became legal authority in antebellum America. Examining a series of cases implicating the constitutional politics of slavery, it illustrates how legal professionals grasped the public power of constitutional origin stories. To produce meanings and legitimate rulings, lawyers and judges wrote and reproduced narratives about slavery at the Founding, converting ascriptions of original constitutional visions in formal constitutional law. This power derived from the ongoing popular construction of the Founding as a venerated and authoritative moment containing unwritten intentions, understandings, and promises binding upon subsequent generations. The essay argues that these developments belong to the deep history of originalism. By approaching originalism as a form of constitutional politics integrating public memory culture and legal reasoning, the essay locates the central public and juridical dynamics of originalism emerging in struggles over the constitutional identity of slavery.

  PublisherDOI

• Reframing the Fathers' Constitution: The Centralized State and Centrality of Slavery in the Confederate Constitutional Order

  The Journal of Southern History · 2017-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reframing the Fathers' Constitution:The Centralized State and Centrality of Slavery in the Confederate Constitutional Order Aaron R. Hall (bio) Benjamin H. Hill rose before a rapt audience in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 4, 1861. Months earlier, he had spoken against secession in the state senate. His message had now changed. As a delegate to the Montgomery, Alabama, constitutional convention and member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America (CSA), Hill did not need his famed oratory to secure the crowd's attention. He came bearing constitutional meaning: "We have not abandoned the provisions of the old Constitution, nor set at nought the wisdom of its framers. The framers of the new do not claim to be more wise than those of the old." Nevertheless, Hill continued, "They have improved upon the old—not because they were wiser—but because they had the light of seventy-three years' experience to guide them." In this strange constitutional moment, Hill made one principle clear to his constituency. "In short," he proclaimed, "the General Government, in all its jurisdiction, is required to protect Slavery." If a bloody clash with the United States ensued, the Confederacy stood ready because "[w]e can keep our negroes at work to support us while we send our young men to war." On the prospects for reunion, the once cautious Hill vowed, "If it is to go back to the Old Constitution,… I am utterly, utterly, and forever opposed to it!" Musing on changes and continuities, this constitutional framer plausibly fulfilled his promise "to speak candidly with you to-night." But there was much Hill could not say. Those "seventy-three years' experience" separating an eighteenth-century Philadelphia hall from the Montgomery framers' convention ensured that the meaning of the Confederacy's [End Page 255] constitutional order would only become visible over time and under duress.1 "Deratification" swept the lower South in early 1861. Constitutional tissue was severed by word, perception, and deed. With the ceremony of conventions and formality of ordinances, six southernmost states had purported to resume perfect sovereignty by February 1861. Texas soon followed, and four states of the upper South had cut their national sinews by May's end. Yet unbridled statehood was fleeting, as southern leaders sought consolidation with existential haste. Gathering in Montgomery on February 4, delegates scripted a political community and legal identity, the Confederate States of America. The convention created a provisional constitution four days after convening and began drafting a "Permanent Constitution," adopted on March 11. The body rendered itself into a Provisional Congress, wielding authority throughout the following year.2 The Confederacy awoke under looming dangers with an appetite for order, security, and state capacity. "We must meet [Abraham] Lincoln with a President of our own. We want the military resources of the South concentrated at once," U.S. assistant secretary of state William Henry Trescot urged in January, upon resigning his post.3 Before abandoning the U.S. Senate, Florida's David L. Yulee proposed "a Southern Government as soon as possible, adopting the present Federal Constitution for the time, and a Southern Army."4 Attentive to risks, financier Gazaway B. Lamar counseled the Provisional Congress on the imperative of constitutional bonds, "to clinch the people for their support hereafter, when things change and the burdens become onerous." Lewis M. Stone, [End Page 256] an Alabama secession convention delegate, anticipated "a real, substantial Government—one armed with all the power to resist any shock to which we may be subjected; a Government complete in all its parts, established upon an immovable basis, and possessed of all the elements of national strength."5 At stake was the viability of secessionists' aims: a slaveholding republic, a South without a North.6 State conventions swiftly ratified the new Confederate constitution. Only Texas held a referendum.7 As Alabama delegate Robert Jemison Jr. concluded, it is "our duty … to check the popular impulse" and to "present to the world an unbroken front." The people out-of-doors did not speak; they followed. As one troubled delegate observed, "You then have made the Congress; the Congress made the Constitution, and the Constitution is not submitted...

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Frequent coauthors

• Prabhu Pingali

  Cornell University

  1 shared

• Jocelyn Boiteau

  New York State College of Agriculture & Life Sciences

  1 shared

• Abhinav Choudhry

  Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land Grant Professorship, 2025 - 2027
• Gilder Lehman Center Visiting Assistant Professor, Yale Univ…
• National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2022
• Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award, Southern Hi…
• Fellow, J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History,…