Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War

Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War PDF Author: Paul D. Moreno
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823291250
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The irreducibly constitutional nature of the Civil War's prelude and legacy is the focus of this absorbing collection of nine essays by a diversity of political theorists and historians. The contributors examine key constitutional developments leading up to the war, the crucial role of Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship, and how the constitutional aspects of the war and Reconstruction endured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thoughtful, informative volume covers a wide range of topics: from George Washington's conception of the Union and his fears for its future to Martin Van Buren's state-centered, anti-secessionist federalism; from Lincoln's approach to citizenship for African Americans to Woodrow Wilson's attempt to appropriate Lincoln for the goals of Progressivism. Each essay zeroes in on the constitutional causes or consequences of the war and emphasizes how constitutional principles shape political activity. Accordingly, important figures, disputes, and judicial decisions are placed within the broader context of the constitutional system to explain how ideas and institutions, independently and in dialogue with the courts, have oriented political action and shaped events over time.

Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War

Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War PDF Author: Paul D. Moreno
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823291250
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
The irreducibly constitutional nature of the Civil War's prelude and legacy is the focus of this absorbing collection of nine essays by a diversity of political theorists and historians. The contributors examine key constitutional developments leading up to the war, the crucial role of Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship, and how the constitutional aspects of the war and Reconstruction endured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thoughtful, informative volume covers a wide range of topics: from George Washington's conception of the Union and his fears for its future to Martin Van Buren's state-centered, anti-secessionist federalism; from Lincoln's approach to citizenship for African Americans to Woodrow Wilson's attempt to appropriate Lincoln for the goals of Progressivism. Each essay zeroes in on the constitutional causes or consequences of the war and emphasizes how constitutional principles shape political activity. Accordingly, important figures, disputes, and judicial decisions are placed within the broader context of the constitutional system to explain how ideas and institutions, independently and in dialogue with the courts, have oriented political action and shaped events over time.

Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War

Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War PDF Author: Paul D. Moreno
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823251942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Nine essays which examine constitutional issues at different points in American political history to explain how the constitutional issues resulting in the Civil War were central to politics for a long time before and after the actual conflict. Treats the period from the 1780s through the 1920s.

Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era

Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era PDF Author: Herman Belz
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
When the American people went to war in 1861, the task and the duty of maintaining the foundation principles of the republican experiment were in jeopardy. The question of if, and how, these principles should be preserved was of pressing importance. The outcome of the war could require the republican government to be transformed in order to strengthen the union or, conversely, if the war created the revolutionary situation that at times seemed pending, new principles for the resulting new nation would have to be formed as it emerged from the destruction and dislocation of the war. These were the issues to bear on the Constitution during the Civil War. These were the dilemas facing President Lincoln. This book, by one of the nation's leading constitutional historians, analyzes the nature and tendency of American Constitutionalism during the nation's greatest political crisis. In a series of related essays, Herman Belz combines detailed narrative with probing judicial analysis of the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, his exercise of executive power, and the application of the equality principle which would become a central issue during Reconstruction. Belz's essays are interdisciplinary in their approach, combining history, political science, and jurisprudence to study the political and constitutional climate and the changes which occurred under Lincoln during and after the war. Belz studies Lincoln as the focus of both contemporary political controversy and subsequent historical debate over the conservative or revolutionary character of Civil War Constitutionalism. He explores the politically controversial nature of the equality principle that lay at the heart of the slavery struggle and its resolution in wartime emancipation.

The Constitution and the Nation

The Constitution and the Nation PDF Author: Christopher Waldrep
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The Civil War shook America to the core of its constitutional foundations. Before the war, the Constitution protected slavery and kept power decentralized. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln gathered enormous national power to combat what he called the «anarchy» of secession. After the war, the nation struggled to understand what had happened. Historians Christopher Waldrep and Lynne Curry have assembled a collection of constitutional documents to explore the meaning of the Civil War, the influence of constitutionalism on presidential war powers, and the U.S. Supreme Court's fight to limit the war's impact in post-Civil War America.

The Political Thought of the Civil War

The Political Thought of the Civil War PDF Author: Alan Levine
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700629114
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Why does the Civil War still speak to us so powerfully? If we listen to the most thoughtful, forceful, and passionate voices of that day we find that many of the questions at the heart of that conflict are also central to the very idea of America—and that many of them remain unresolved in our own time. The Political Thought of the Civil War offers us the opportunity to pursue these questions from a new, critical perspective as leading scholars of American political science, history, and literature engage in some of the crucial debates of the Civil War era—and in the process illuminate more clearly the foundation and fault lines of the American regime. The essays in this volume use practical dilemmas of the Civil War to reveal and probe fundamental questions about the status of slavery and race in the American founding, the tension between moralism and constitutionalism, and the problem of creating and sustaining a multiracial society on the basis of the original principles of the American regime. Adopting a deliberative approach, the authors revisit the words and deeds of the most important political actors of era, from William Lloyd Garrison, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln to Alexander Stephens and Frederick Douglass, with reference to the American Founders and the architects of Reconstruction. The essays in this volume consider the difficult choices each of these figures made, the specific problems they were responding to, and the consequences of those choices. As this book exposes and explores the theoretical principles at play within their historical context, it also offers vivid reminders of how the great controversies surrounding the Civil War continue to shape American political life to this day.

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation PDF Author: Mark E. Neely Jr.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807869023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival. Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

Lincoln's Constitution

Lincoln's Constitution PDF Author: Daniel A. Farber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226237958
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In Lincoln's Constitution Daniel Farber leads the reader to understand exactly how Abraham Lincoln faced the inevitable constitutional issues brought on by the Civil War. Examining what arguments Lincoln made in defense of his actions and how his words and deeds fit into the context of the times, Farber illuminates Lincoln's actions by placing them squarely within their historical moment. The answers here are crucial not only for a better understanding of the Civil War but also for shedding light on issues-state sovereignty, presidential power, and limitations on civil liberties in the name of national security-that continue to test the limits of constitutional law even today.

Southern Rights

Southern Rights PDF Author: Mark E. Neely
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
During the civil war that followed, not a day would pass when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners."--BOOK JACKET.

The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal

The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal PDF Author: Paul D. Moreno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The story of the breakdown of limited government in America and the rise of the federal state.

Common Good Constitutionalism

Common Good Constitutionalism PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509548882
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
The way that Americans understand their Constitution and wider legal tradition has been dominated in recent decades by two exhausted approaches: the originalism of conservatives and the “living constitutionalism” of progressives. Is it time to look for an alternative? Adrian Vermeule argues that the alternative has been there, buried in the American legal tradition, all along. He shows that US law was, from the founding, subsumed within the broad framework of the classical legal tradition, which conceives law as “a reasoned ordering to the common good.” In this view, law’s purpose is to promote the goods a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. He shows how this legacy has been lost, despite still being implicit within American public law, and convincingly argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.” This erudite and brilliantly original book is a vital intervention in America’s most significant contemporary legal debate while also being an enduring account of the true nature of law that will resonate for decades with scholars and students.