The Damaged Structure: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

An modern account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer

Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the US to attaining liberty and justice for all. He led the nation right into a bloody civil warfare to uphold the system of presidency established by the US Structure―a system he considered the “final finest hope of mankind.” However how did Lincoln perceive the Structure?

On this groundbreaking research, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln intentionally and recurrently violated the US’ founding preparations. When he got here to energy, it was broadly believed that the federal authorities couldn’t use armed pressure to forestall a state from seceding. It was additionally assumed that primary civil liberties may very well be suspended in a rebel by Congress however not by the president, and that the federal authorities had no authority over slavery in states the place it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and successfully rewrote the Structure’s place within the American system. Earlier than the Civil Struggle, the Structure was finest understood as a compromise pact―a tough and prepared deal between states that allowed the Union to kind and performance. After Lincoln, the Structure got here to be seen as a sacred textual content―a transcendent assertion of the nation’s highest beliefs.

The Damaged Structure is the primary e book to inform the story of how Lincoln broke the Structure as a way to remake it. To take action, it gives a riveting narrative of his constitutional decisions and the way he made them―and locations Lincoln within the wealthy context of pondering of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues.

Consists of 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations