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Full 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.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: the civil War as a Regime Question, Thomas W. Merrill, Alan Levine, and James R. Stoner, Jr.
Part I: The Problem
1. The Later Jefferson and the Problem of Natural Rights, Thomas W. Merrill
2. Slavery and the US Supreme Court, Keith E. Whittington
3. Antebellum Natural Rights Liberalism, Daniel S. Malachuk
4. Scientific Racism in Antebellum America, Alan Levine
5. From Calhoun to Secession, James H. Read
Part II: Hard Choices
6. Lincoln and "the Public Estimate of the Negro": From Anti-Amalgamation to Antislavery, Diana J. Schaub
7. Why Did Lincoln Go to War?, Steven B. Smith
8. The Lincolnian Constitution, Caleb Verbois
9. To Preserve, Protect, and Defend: The Emancipation Proclamation, W. B. Allen
10. The Case of the Confederate Constitution, James R. Stoner, Jr.
Part III: Pyrrhic Victories?
11. Completing the Constitution: the Reconstruction Amendments, Michael Zuckert
12. The Politics of Reconstruction and the Problem of Self-Government, Philip B. Lyons
13. "A School for the Moral Education of the Nation": Frederick Douglass on the Meaning of the Civil War, Peter C. Myers
14. The South and American Constitutionalism after the Civil War, Johnathan O'Neill
List of Contributors
Index
