Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism

Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism PDF Author: Don Edward Fehrenbacher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807120361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Historian and scholar Lukacs addresses topics including the real role of the Hungarian emigration, its place in the history of Hungary, and the emigration's international political aims, successes, and failures. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism

Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism PDF Author: Don Edward Fehrenbacher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807120361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historian and scholar Lukacs addresses topics including the real role of the Hungarian emigration, its place in the history of Hungary, and the emigration's international political aims, successes, and failures. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848

The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 PDF Author: William M. Wiecek
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848".

The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War

The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War PDF Author: Michael F. Conlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Demonstrates the crucial role that the Constitution played in the coming of the Civil War.

American Sovereigns

American Sovereigns PDF Author: Christian G. Fritz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139467174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory and jurisprudence that sees today's constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. American Sovereigns examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity - the people - would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant that the people were the sovereign and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved in 1776, in 1787, or prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today's constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.

Framing the Solid South

Framing the Solid South PDF Author: Paul E. Herron
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700624376
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The South was not always the South. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those below the Potomac River, for all their cultural and economic similarities, did not hold a separate political identity. How this changed, and how the South came to be a political entity that coheres to this day, emerges clearly in this book—the first comprehensive account of the Civil War Era and late nineteenth century state constitutional conventions that forever transformed southern politics. From 1860 to the turn of the twentieth century, southerners in eleven states gathered forty-four times to revise their constitutions. Framing the Solid South traces the consolidation of the southern states through these conventions in three waves of development: Secession, Reconstruction, and Redemption. Secession conventions, Paul Herron finds, did much more than dissolve the Union; they acted in concert to raise armies, write law, elect delegates to write a Confederate Constitution, ratify that constitution, and rewrite state constitutions. During Reconstruction, the national government forced the southern states to write and rewrite constitutions to permit re-entry into the Union—recognizing federal supremacy, granting voting rights to African Americans, enshrining a right to public education, and opening the political system to broader participation. Black southerners were essential participants in democratizing the region and reconsidering the nature of federalism in light of the devastation brought by proponents of states’ rights and sovereignty. Many of the changes by the postwar conventions, Herron shows, were undermined if not outright abolished in the following period, as “Redeemers” enshrined a system of weak states, the rule of a white elite, and the suppression of black rights. Southern constitution makers in all three waves were connected to each other and to previous conventions unlike any others in American history. These connections affected the content of the fundamental law and political development in the region. Southern politics, to an unusual degree, has been a product of the process Herron traces. What his book tells us about these constitutional conventions and the documents they produced is key to understanding southern history and the South today.

Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers

Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers PDF Author: M. J. C. Vile
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780865971752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Arguably no political principle has been more central than the separation of powers to the evolution of constitutional governance in Western democracies. In the definitive work on the subject, M. J. C. Vile traces the history of the doctrine from its rise during the English Civil War, through its development in the eighteenth century—when it was indispensable to the founders of the American republic—through subsequent political thought and constitution-making in Britain, France, and the United States. The author concludes with an examination of criticisms of the doctrine by both behavioralists and centralizers—and with "A Model of a Theory of Constitutionalism." The new Liberty Fund second edition includes the entirety of the original 1967 text published by Oxford, a major epilogue entitled "The Separation of Powers and the Administrative State," and a bibliography. M. J. C. Vile is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury and author also of The Structure of American Federalism.

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.

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 Enigmatic South

The Enigmatic South PDF Author: Samuel C. Hyde, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807156957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The Enigmatic South brings together leading scholars of the Civil War period to challenge existing perceptions of the advance to secession, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The pioneering research and innovative arguments of these historians bring crucial insights to the study of this era in American history. Christopher Childers, Sarah L. Hyde, and Julia Huston Nguyen consider the ways politics, religion, and education contributed to southern attitudes toward secession in the antebellum period. George C. Rable, Paul F. Paskoff, and John M. Sacher delve into the challenges the Confederate South faced as it sought legitimacy for its cause and military strength for the coming war with the North. Richard Follett, Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., and Eric H. Walther offer new perspectives on the changes the Civil War wrought on the economic and ideological landscape of the South. The essays in The Enigmatic South speak eloquently to previously unconsidered aspects and legacies of the Civil War and make a major contribution to our understanding of the rich history of a conflict whose aftereffects still linger in American culture and memory.

Understanding State Constitutions

Understanding State Constitutions PDF Author: G. Alan Tarr
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188556
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
For many Americans, the word "constitution" means just one thing: the national Constitution. According to a recent survey, almost half do not know that individual states also have constitutions. Scholars have also paid little attention to state constitutions, favoring the apparently more dynamic and significant federal scene. G. Alan Tarr seeks to change that in this landmark book. A leading authority on state legal issues, he combines history, law, and political science to present a thorough and long-needed account of the distinct and important role of state constitutions in American life. Tarr shows that state constitutional politics are dominated by three crucial issues with little salience at the national level: the distribution of power among groups and regions within states, the scope of state and local governmental authority, and the relation of the state to economic activity. He explains how state constitutions differ from the national Constitution in treating not only matters of high principle but also such mundane subjects as ski trails and motor vehicle revenues. He also explores why state constitutions, unlike their federal counterpart, have been so frequently amended and replaced. Tarr concludes that the United States not only has a system of dual constitutionalism but also has dual constitutional cultures. Powerfully argued and meticulously researched, the book fills an important gap in political and legal studies and finally gives state constitutions the scholarly attention they richly deserve.