Sectional Crisis And Southern Constitutionalism

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 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.

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.

"This comparative study of state constitutions offers insightful overviews of the general and specific problems that have confronted America's constitution writers since the country's founding. Each chapter reflects the constitutional theory and history of a single state, encompassing each document's structure, content, and evolution"--Provided by publisher.

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation. Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered Civil War. Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.

In this eye-opening account, Eli Merritt reveals the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart during the American Revolution. So fractious were the founders’ political fights that they feared the War of Independence might end in disunion and civil war. Instead of disbanding into separate regional confederacies, the founders managed to unite for the sake of liberty and self-preservation. In so doing, they succeeded in holding the young nation together. To achieve this, they forged grueling compromises, including Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Mississippi-Fisheries Compromise of 1779, and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781. In addition to bringing new insights to the history of the American Revolution, Disunion Among Ourselves has inevitable resonances with our present era of political hyperpolarization and serves as a touchstone for contemporary politics, reminding us that the founders overcame far tougher times than our own through commitment to ethical constitutional democracy and compromise.

While slavery and secession divided the Union during the American Civil War, they also severed the Northern and Southern dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church. In Challenges on the Emmaus Road, T. Felder Dorn focuses on the way Northern and Southern Episcopal bishops confronted and responded to the issues and events of their turbulent times. Prior to the Civil War, Southern bishops were industrious in evangelizing among enslaved African Americans, but at the same time they supported the legal and social aspects of the "peculiar institution." Southern and Northern bishops parted company over the institution of slavery, not over the place of blacks in the Episcopal Church. As Southern states left the Union, Southern dioceses separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States. The book's title was inspired by the Gospel of Luke 24:13-35 in which the resurrected Jesus Christ walked unrecognized with his disciples and discussed the events of his own crucifixion and disappearance from his tomb. Dorn perceives that scriptural episode as a metaphor for the responses of Episcopal bishops to the events of the Civil War era. Dorn carefully summarizes the debates within the church and in secular society surrounding the important topics of the era. In doing so, he lays the groundwork for his own interpretations of church history and also provides authentic data for other church scholars to investigate such topics as faith and doctrine, evangelism, and the administrative history of one of the most important institutions in America. Dorn devotes the final chapters to the postwar reunification of the Episcopal Church and Southern bishops' involvement in establishing the Commission on Freedmen to offer help with the educational and spiritual needs of the recently emancipated slaves.