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

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
This ambitious book examines the constitutional and legal doctrines of the antislavery movement from the eve of the American Revolution to the Wilmot Proviso and the 1848 national elections. Relating political activity to constitutional thought, William M. Wiecek surveys the antislavery societies, the ideas of their individual members, and the actions of those opposed to slavery and its expansion into the territories. He shows that the idea of constitutionalism has popular origins and was not the exclusive creation of a caste of lawyers. In offering a sophisticated examination of both sides of the argument about slavery, he not only discusses court cases and statutes, but also considers a broad range of "extrajudicial" thought—political speeches and pamphlets, legislative debates and arguments.

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 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: 9781139467179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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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.

Disenfranchising Democracy

Disenfranchising Democracy PDF Author: David A. Bateman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110847019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Disenfranchising Democracy examines the exclusions that accompany democratization and provides a theory of the expansion and restriction of voting rights.

Constitutions in Times of Financial Crisis

Constitutions in Times of Financial Crisis PDF Author: Tom Ginsburg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108729208
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Many constitutions include provisions intended to limit the discretion of governments in economic policy. In times of financial crises, such provisions often come under pressure as a result of calls for exceptional responses to crisis situations. This volume assesses the ability of constitutional orders all over the world to cope with financial crises, and the demands for emergency powers that typically accompany them. Bringing together a variety of perspectives from legal scholars, economists, and political scientists, this volume traces the long-run implications of financial crises for constitutional order. In exploring the theoretical and practical problems raised by the constitutionalization of economic policy during times of severe crisis, this volume showcases an array of constitutional design options and the ways they channel governmental responses to emergency.

Recreating the American Republic

Recreating the American Republic PDF Author: Charles A. Kromkowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139435787
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Political historians recognize the colonial years and the American Revolution, the early national era and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the nineteenth century and the American Civil War as the three most important eras in American history. Recreating the American Republic offers the first comparative historical analysis and synthesis of these.

States' Rights and the Union

States' Rights and the Union PDF Author: Forrest McDonald
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700612270
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Forrest McDonald has long been recognized as one of our most respected and provocative intellectual hsitorians. With this new book, he once again delivers an illuminating meditation on a major theme in American history and politics. Elegantly and accessibly written for a broad readership, McDonald's book provides an insightful look at states' rights-an issue that continues to stir debate nationwide. From constitutional scholars to Supreme Court justices to an electorate that's grown increasingly wary of federal power, the concept of states' rights has become a touchstone for a host of political and legal controversies. But, as McDonald shows, that concept has deep roots that need to be examined if we're to understand its implications for current and future debates. McDonald's study revolves around the concept of imperium in imperio-literally "sovereignty within sovereignty" or the division of power within a single jurisdiction. With this broad principle in hand, he traces the states' rights idea from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction and illuminates the constitutional, political, and economic contexts in which it evolved. Although the Constitution, McDonald shows, gave the central government expansive powers, it also legitimated the doctrine of states' rights. The result was an uneasy tension and uncertainty about the nature of the central government's relationship to the states. At times the issue bubbled silently and unseen beneath the surface of public awareness, but at other times it exploded. McDonald follows this episodic rise and fall of federal-state relations from the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, New England's resistance to Jefferson's foreign policy and the War of 1812, the Nullification Controversy, Andrew Jackson's war against the Bank of the United States, and finally the vitriolic public debates that led to secession and civil war. Other scholars have touched upon these events individually, but McDonald is the first to integrate all of them from the perspective of states' rights into one synthetic and magisterial vision. The result is another brilliant study from a masterful historian writing on a subject of great import for Americans.