Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution

Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution PDF Author: George Anastaplo
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739171771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In this insightful book about constitutional law and slavery, George Anastaplo illuminates both how the history of race relations in the United States should be approached and how seemingly hopeless social and political challenges can be usefully considered through the lens of the U.S. Constitution. He examines the outbreak of the American Civil War, its prosecution, and its aftermath, tracing the concept of slavery and law from its earliest beginnings and slavery’s fraught legal history within the United States. Anastaplo offers discussions that bring into focus discussions of slavery in Ancient Greece and within the Bible, showing their influence on the Constitution and the subsequent political struggles that led to the Civil War.

Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution

Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution PDF Author: George Anastaplo
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739171771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book

Book Description
In this insightful book about constitutional law and slavery, George Anastaplo illuminates both how the history of race relations in the United States should be approached and how seemingly hopeless social and political challenges can be usefully considered through the lens of the U.S. Constitution. He examines the outbreak of the American Civil War, its prosecution, and its aftermath, tracing the concept of slavery and law from its earliest beginnings and slavery’s fraught legal history within the United States. Anastaplo offers discussions that bring into focus discussions of slavery in Ancient Greece and within the Bible, showing their influence on the Constitution and the subsequent political struggles that led to the Civil War.

Reflections on Slavery: in Reply to Certain Passages of a Speech Recently Delivered by Mr. Canning

Reflections on Slavery: in Reply to Certain Passages of a Speech Recently Delivered by Mr. Canning PDF Author: Joseph Beldam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antislavery movements
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description


The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution PDF Author: James Oakes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies. The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action—in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade—they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonization of free Blacks abroad. President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King’s cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.

Thoughts Upon Slavery

Thoughts Upon Slavery PDF Author: John Wesley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Slavery
Languages : cs
Pages : 32

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Book Description


The Broken Constitution

The Broken Constitution PDF Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

The Constitution of the People

The Constitution of the People PDF Author: Robert E. Calvert
Publisher: Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Lectures at a spring 1987 symposium held at DePauw University with the theme "the meaning of membership in a constitutional order requiring.

Thoughts for the Times

Thoughts for the Times PDF Author: Joel Prentiss Bishop
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description


Originalism and the Good Constitution

Originalism and the Good Constitution PDF Author: John O. McGinnis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067472626X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at the time it was enacted. In their innovative defense of originalism, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport maintain that the text of the Constitution should be adhered to by the Supreme Court because it was enacted by supermajorities--both its original enactment under Article VII and subsequent Amendments under Article V. A text approved by supermajorities has special value in a democracy because it has unusually wide support and thus tends to maximize the welfare of the greatest number. The authors recognize and respond to many possible objections. Does originalism perpetuate the dead hand of the past? How can originalism be justified, given the exclusion of African Americans and women from the Constitution and many of its subsequent Amendments? What is originalism's place in interpretation, after two hundred years of non-originalist precedent? A fascinating counterfactual they pose is this: had the Supreme Court not interpreted the Constitution so freely, perhaps the nation would have resorted to the Article V amendment process more often and with greater effect. Their book will be an important contribution to the literature on originalism, now the most prominent theory of constitutional interpretation.

Slavery and the Founders

Slavery and the Founders PDF Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe
ISBN: 076564147X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
The new edition of this classic work addresses how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. This third edition incorporates a new chapter on the regulation of the African slave trade and the latest research on Thomas Jefferson.

Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution

Reflections on Slavery and the Constitution PDF Author: George Anastaplo
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739171763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In this insightful book about constitutional law and slavery, George Anastaplo illuminates both how the history of race relations in the United States should be approached and how seemingly hopeless social and political challenges can be usefully considered through the lens of the U.S. Constitution. He examines the outbreak of the American Civil War, its prosecution, and its aftermath, tracing the concept of slavery and law from its earliest beginnings and slavery's fraught legal history within the United States. Anastaplo offers discussions that bring into focus discussions of slavery in Ancient Greece and within the Bible, showing their influence on the Constitution and the subsequent political struggles that led to the Civil War.