Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (The North's Civil War) - Softcover

Belz, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823217698 ISBN 13: 9780823217694

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Herman Belz is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He is the author of some fifty-six articles or chapters in books and nineteen essays, and he has served as consultant to the American Historical Association’s Constitutional History in the Schools Project, National Endowment for the Humanities, Educational Testing Service, National Video Communications, Vision Associates, and the Carter Museum and Library. Professor Belz has won grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Bar Foundation for Legal History, among others. His first book was awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. He has served on numerous University of Maryland committees, was Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, and was a member of the Campus Senate Executive Committee and a member of the Graduate Council. Professor Belz was a Visiting Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University in the academic year 2001–2002 and was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities in 2005.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823217698
• ISBN 13: 9780823217694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 265