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The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America
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About This Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAn 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
Reviews
"Feldman offers an elucidating look into Lincoln's incremental thinking, neatly demonstrating how he articulated the 'before' and 'after' Constitution in the Gettysburg Address as a compromise versus a moral document, using an Old Testament/New Testament analogy that embodied equality for all promised in the Declaration of Independence."
"not all that Lincoln did has necessarily redounded to the benefit of or progress toward a 'more perfect union,' notwithstanding our veneration of him as virtually our greatest president."
"But his astute argument would have been better served by a less-polemical tone."
"In describing interactions among political groups, voting rights, diverse views of abolitionists, suspending habeas corpus, and censorship, Feldman offers insights strikingly relevant to today's politics."
"Though the wealth of detail on Lincoln's life and travels bogs down the narrative somewhat, this is an astute and eye-opening look at an underexamined aspect of the quest to end slavery."
"The Broken Constitution is more than an account of the Civil War as a constitutional crisis."
"Feldman's reliance on Jefferson Davis to frame a book on Abraham Lincoln thus makes perfect sense: Aside from the slaveholders' insistence on the ethical legitimacy of slavery, Feldman's constitutional analysis consistently backs their arguments over Lincoln's."
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