A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights

Laura F. Edwards

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139017695

Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the American Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering Americans' relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2015

‘Bold, brilliant, and sweeping, this concise history places the transformation of American law at the center of the Civil War. In clear analysis of constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, expanding wartime powers, and everyday people’s bold claims, Edwards shows that a war fought to preserve a legal order ended up almost entirely remaking it. The legal dismantling of American slavery not only extended rights to new people but also reconfigured what rights meant and why they were so central to the new American nation that the war made.’

Gregory Downs - City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York

‘A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction offers a compelling new account of how the Civil War transformed the American legal order. Edwards, a leading historian of the nineteenth century, connects developments at the federal level with the histories of African Americans, women, and organized laborers. Her treatment of the complex relationship between individual rights and inequality should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the modern United States.’

Kate Masur - Northwestern University, Illinois

‘In A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Laura Edwards combines a brilliant synthesis of decades of scholarship with original insights and analysis. She lucidly demonstrates how the social tumult and fearsome politics of the Civil War era reshaped the nation’s legal order and Americans’ ideas about the meaning of rights.’

Michael A. Ross - University of Maryland

‘This is an important addition to the literature on American social and legal history. Edwards shows how the Civil War forever changed the conception of the Constitution, federalism, and individual rights. In an eminently readable account, she traces the evolution of legal thought and practice in the North brought about by the Civil War … This well-researched, well-written book is accessible and useful for scholars ranging from ambitious high school students to established senior scholars. It is superb. Summing up: essential.’

M. M. Feeley Source: Choice

'A superb synthesis … Edwards challenges traditional and revisionist narratives as she infuses legal history into dialogue with scholarship running from the Dunning school of the early 1900s to the present. She provides fresh views on old issues as she, for example, explicates the irony of centralization in the Confederate federal government. Moreover, she provides captivating insights beyond the 1861 to 1877 period in demonstrating the error of conflating the federal government with the nation and so oversimplifying governance within the nation, and in persistently reminding readers that the story of the nation is one of ongoing conflict mirroring the American people's aspirations in all their contradictory possibilities.'

Thomas J. Davis Source: The Journal of American History

'In this remarkable synthesis of multiple strands of historiography Laura F. Edwards makes it stunningly clear that legal change was broader and deeper than conventionally imagined. Intended for student use but speaking in original and elegant terms to specialists and non-specialists, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights offers a concise narrative that makes the correction of historiographical myopia look easy.'

Pamela Brandwein Source: The American Historical Review

'Laura F. Edwards analyzes the legal transformations in rights brought about by the national experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction … Edwards’s book thoughtfully intervenes in debates over the meaning of this period and provides a remarkably fresh perspective on this well-tilled ground.'

Julie Novkov Source: Journal of Southern History

'Edwards deftly incorporates historical information about the impacts of the legal changes of this era on many segments of the US population. Moving beyond a traditional emphasis on the social categories of white and black, the author provides valuable context about the impacts of the era’s legal changes on women in general (both black and white), workers in the expanding industrial sector, and Native Americans. Edwards also offers her readers an alternative to the dominant North-South ‘axis’ of the historiography of Reconstruction … Any library that collects in the areas of legal history, constitutional history, or civil rights would be well served by the addition of this title.'

Jennifer L. Laws Source: Law Library Journal

References

Bibliographic Essay

Bibliography

Ackerman, Bruce. We the People, Vol. 2: Transformations. Cambridge, MA, 1998.

Arenson, Adam. The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. Cambridge, MA, 2011.

Ayers, Edward L.Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South. New York, 1984.

Aynes, Richard L. “On Misreading John Bingham and the Fourteenth Amendment.” Yale Law Journal 107 (1993): 57–104.

Baer, Judith. The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women’s Labor Legislation. Westport, CT, 1978.

Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Bardaglio, Peter Winthrop. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC, 1995.

Beale, Howard K.The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. New York, 1930.

Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R.. The Rise of American Civilization, 2 Vols. New York, 1927.

Belz, Herman. Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War. Ithaca, NY, 1969.

Belz, HermanAbraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War. New York, 1998.

Benedict, Michael Les. A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869. New York, 1974.

Bensel, Richard Franklin. “Southern Leviathan: The Development of Central State Authority in the Confederate States of America.” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 68–136.

Bensel, Richard FranklinYankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859–1877. New York, 1990.

Bercaw, Nancy D.Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875. Gainesville, FL, 2003.

Berlin, Ira, Miller, Stephen F., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds. “Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.” Radical History Review 42 (1988): 89–121.

Berlin, Ira, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 2: The Black Military Experience. New York, 1982.

Berlin, Ira, Miller, Steven F., Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 1, Vol. 2: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South. New York, 1993.

Berlin, Ira, Fields, Barbara J., Glymph, Thavolia, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 1, Vol. 1: The Destruction of Slavery. New York, 1985.

Berlin, Ira, Glymph, Thavolia, Miller, Steven F., Reidy, Joseph P., Rowland, Leslie S., and Saville, Julie, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 1, Vol. 3: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South. New York, 1990.

Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York, 1990.

Berringer, Richard E, Hattaway, Herman, Jones, Archer, and Still, William N.. Why the South Lost the Civil War. Athens, GA, 1986.

Berwanger, Eugene. The West and Reconstruction. Urbana, IL, 1981.

Black, Robert C.Railroads of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill, NC, 1952.

Blair, William Alan. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York, 1998.

Boman, Dennis K.Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security. Baton Rouge, LA, 2011.

Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. New York, 1994.

Bowers, Claude. The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln. Cambridge, MA, 1929.

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York, 1990.

Brandwein, Pamela. Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction. New York, 2011.

Brody, David. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle. New York, 1980.

Brown, Elsa Barkley. “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.” Public Culture 7 (1994): 107–26.

Bruyneel, Kevin. “Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the ‘Gift’ of U.S. Citizenship.” Studies in American Political Development 18 (2004): 130–43.

Bryant, Jonathan M.How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850–1885. Chapel Hill, NC, 1996.

Burgess, John W.Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876. New York, 1902.

Bynum, Victoria E.Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Chapel Hill, NC, 1992.

Bynum, Victoria E.The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC, 2001.

Calhoun, Charles W.Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900. Lawrence, KS, 2006.

Campbell, Jacqueline Glass. When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front. Chapel Hill, NC, 2003.

Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat. New York, 1965.

Chandler, Alfred D.The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA, 1977.

Chang, David A.The Color of Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Land Ownership in 1832–1929. Chapel Hill, 2010.

Cimbala, Paul A.Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870. Athens, GA, 1997.

Cole, Arthur Charles. The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865. New York, 1934.

Cott, Nancy F.The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven, CT, 1977.

Cott, Nancy F.Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA, 2000.

Coulter, E. Merton. The Confederate States of America, 1861–1865. Baton Rouge, LA, 1950.

Cox, Coy F.Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges. East Lansing, MI, 1999.

Cox, LaWanda. Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential leadership. Columbia, SC, 1981.

Cox, LaWanda and John, H. Cox. Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America. New York, 1963.

Craven, Avery. The Repressible Conflict 1830–1861. Baton Rouge, LA, 1939.

Crofts, Daniel W.Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill, NC, 1989.

Davis, Hugh. “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction. Ithaca, NY, 2011.

Davis, William C.Jefferson Davis: A Man and His Hour. New York, 1991.

DeRosa, Marshall L.The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism. Columbia, MO, 1991.

Douglas, Davison M.Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954. New York, 2005.

Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 Vols. Edited by Foner, Philip. New York, 1950–75.

Downs, Gregory P.Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908. Chapel Hill, NC, 2011.

Downs, Gregory P. “The Ends of War: Fighting the Civil War after Appomattox.” Unpublished manuscript.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca, NY, 1978.

DuBois, W. E. B.Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York, 1935.

Dudden, Faye E.Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. New York, 2011.

Dunning, William Archibald. Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics. New York, 1898.

Dunning, William ArchibaldReconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877. New York, 1907.

Durden, Robert Franklin. The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Baton Rouge, LA, 1972.

Durrill, Wayne K.War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion. New York, 1990.

Eaton, Clement. Jefferson Davis. New York, 1977.

Edwards, Laura F. “Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville County, North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review 68 (1991): 237–60.

Edwards, Laura F. “‘The Marriage Covenant Is at the Foundation of All Our Rights’: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation.” Law and History Review 14 (1996): 81–124.

Edwards, Laura F.Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana, IL, 1997.

Edwards, Laura F. “The Problem of Dependency: African Americans, Labor Relations, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South.” Agricultural History 72 (1998): 313–40.

Edwards, Laura F.Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women and the Civil War Era. Urbana, IL, 2000.

Edwards, Laura F. “Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South.” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 365–93.

Edwards, Laura F.The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill, NC, 2009.

Escott, Paul D. “Poverty and Governmental Aid for the Poor in Confederate North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review 61 (1984): 462–80.

Escott, Paul D.Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900. Chapel Hill, NC, 1985.

Escott, Paul D.Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy. Westport, CT, 2006.

Escott, Paul D.The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture. Santa Barbara, CA, 2010.

Faulkner, Carol. Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement. Philadelphia, 2003.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Baton Rouge, LA, 1990.

Faust, Drew GilpinMothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC, 2004.

Feimster, Crystal. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching in the American South. Cambridge, MA, 2009.

Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York, 1989.

Fehrenbacher, Don E.The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York, 1978.

Fehrenbacher, Don E.The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relationship to Slavery. New York, 2001.

Fields, Barbara J.Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT, 1985.

Fields, Barbara J. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118.

Finkelman, Paul. An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity. Chapel Hill, NC, 1981.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York, 1970.

Foner, EricNothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge, LA, 1983.

Foner, EricReconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York, 1988.

Foner, EricThe Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York, 2010.

Forbath, William E. “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age.” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (1985): 767–817.

Frankel, Noralee. Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi. Bloomington, IN, 1999.

Freehling, William W.The Road to Disunion, 2 Vols. New York, 1990–2007.

Freehling, William W.The South versus The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. New York, 2001.

Gallagher, Gary W.Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Cambridge, MA, 1997.

Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens, GA, 2002.

Genovese, Eugene D.The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Old South. New York, 1965.

Gerteis, Louis. From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865. Westport, CT, 1973.

Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York, 2008.

Goldman, Robert. A Free Ballot and a Fair Count: The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the South, 1877–1893. New York, 2001a.

Goldman, RobertReconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese and Cruikshank. Lawrence, KS, 2001b.

Goodrich, Thomas. Black Flag: Guerilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861–1865. Bloomington, IN, 1995.

Graber, Mark. Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. New York, 2006.

Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque, NM, 2002.

Gross, Ariela J.Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Princeton, NJ, 2000.

Gross, Ariela J.What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge, MA, 2008.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, NC, 1985.

Grossberg, MichaelA Judgment for Solomon: The d’Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America. New York, 1996.

Hahamovitch, Cindy. The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945. Chapel Hill, NC, 1997.

Hahn, Steven. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890. New York, 1983.

Hahn, StevenA Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA, 2003.

Hahn, Steven, Miller, Steven F., O’Donovan, Susan E., Rodrigue, John C., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 3, Vol. 1: Land and Labor, 1865. Chapel Hill, NC, 2008.

Hall, Catherine. White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. New York, 1992.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching. New York, 1979.

Hamburger, Phillip. “Privileges or Immunities.” Northwestern University Law Review 105 (2011): 61–148.

Hamilton, Daniel W.The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Chicago, 2007.

Harring, Sidney I.Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1994.

Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1923–2015.

Harris, Leslie M.In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. Chicago, 2003.

Harris, William C.With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union. Lexington, KY, 1997.

Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge, MA, 2000.

Hewitt, Nancy A.Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872. Ithaca, NY, 1984.

Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York, 1991.

Holt, Thomas C. “‘An Empire over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South.” In Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited by Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James, 283–331. New York, 1982.

Holt, Thomas C.The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain. Baltimore, MD, 1992.

Hoxie, Frederick E.A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Lincoln, NE, 1984.

Hyman, Harold M.A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. New York, 1973.

Hyman, Harold M. and Wiecek, William M.. Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875. New York, 1982.

Isenberg, Nancy. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC, 1998.

Jaynes, Gerald David. Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882. New York, 1986.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolition: Ordinary Women and the Anti-Slavery Movement. Chapel Hill, NC, 1998.

Johnson, Suzanne Stone and Johnson, Robert Allison, eds. Bitter Freedom: William Stone’s Record of Service in the Freedmen’s Bureau. Columbia, SC, 2008.

Jones, Martha S. “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York.” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 1031–60.

Jones, Martha S. “Hughes v. Jackson: Race and Rights beyond Dred Scott.” North Carolina Law Review 91 (2013): 1757–83.

Josephy, Alvin M.The Civil War in the American West. New York, 1991.

Kaczorowski, Robert J. “Searching for the Intent of the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Connecticut Law Review 5 (1972–3): 368–98.

Kaczorowski, Robert J.The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866–1876. New York, 1985.

Kammen, Michael. A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture. New York, 1986.

Keith, Leanna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. New York, 2008.

Kerber, Linda K.No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York, 1998.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York, 2001.

Kettner, James H.The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill, NC, 1978.

Kyvig, David E.Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995. Lawrence, KS, 1996.

Labbé, Ronald M. and Lurie, Jonathan. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence, KS, 2003.

Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York, 2008.

Lash, Kurt T. “The Origins of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, Part 1: ‘Privileges and Immunities’ as an Antebellum Term of Art.” Georgetown Law Journal 98 (2010): 1241–1302.

Lash, Kurt T. “The Origins of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, Part II: John Bingham and the Second Draft of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Georgetown Law Journal 99 (2011): 329–433.

Lee, Charles Robert. The Confederate Constitutions. Chapel Hill, NC, 1963.

Levine, Bruce C.Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York, 2006.

Levine, Bruce C.The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South. New York, 2013.

Levy, Leonard W.The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw. Cambridge, MA, 1957.

Lichtenstein, Alex. Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. New York, 1996.

Litwack, Leon F.Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York, 1979.

Livesay, Harold C.Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business. Boston, 1975.

Lonn, Ella. Desertion during the Civil War. New York, 1928.

Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York, 2007.

Masur, Kate. “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States.” Journal of American History 93 (2007): 1050–84.

Masur, KateAn Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill, NC, 2010.

McCrary, Peyton. Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment. Princeton, NJ, 1978.

McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York, 1995.

McCurry, StephanieConfederate Reckonings: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA, 2010.

McPherson, James M.Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York, 1998.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY, 1998.

Mettler, Suzanne. Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy. Ithaca, NY, 1998.

Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, MA, 2007.

Montgomery, David. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872. New York, 1967.

Montgomery, DavidWorkers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles. New York, 1979.

Montoya, Maria. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. Berkeley, CA, 2002.

Moore, Albert Burton. Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy. New York, 1924.

Nedelsky, Jennifer. Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism. Chicago, 1990.

Nelson, William E.The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine. Cambridge, MA, 1988.

Neely, Mark E., Jr. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Cambridge, MA, 1983.

Neely, Mark E., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. New York, 1991.

Neely, Mark E., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism. Charlottesville, VA, 1999.

Neely, Mark E., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC, 2011.

Newman, Louise. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. New York, 1999.

Nicolay, John G. and Hay, John, eds. Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 1. New York, 1920.

Nieman, Donald G.To Set the Law in Motion: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865–1868. Millwood, NY, 1979.

Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States. New York, 2013.

O’Donovan, Susan E.Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge, MA, 2007.

Owsley, Frank L.State Rights in the Confederacy. Chicago, 1925.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law, and Equality in the Civil War Era. Urbana, IL, 1975.

Paludan, Phillip ShawA People’s Contest: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865. Lawrence, KS, 1996.

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA, 1988.

Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930. New York, 2000.

Penningroth, Dylan C.The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC, 2003.

Potter, David M.The Impending Crisis 1848–1861. New York, 1976.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. Boston, 1953.

Quigley, Paul. Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865. New York, 2012.

Rabinowitz, Howard N.Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890. New York, 1978.

Rable, George C.But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Athens, GA, 1984.

Rable, George C.Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana, IL, 1989.

Rable, George C.The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel Hill, NC, 1994.

Ramsdell, Charles W. “The Confederate Government and the Railroads.” American Historical Review 22 (1917): 794–810.

Ramsdell, Charles W. “The Control of Manufacturing by the Confederate Government.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 8 (1921): 231–49.

Randall, James G.Constitutional Problems under Lincoln. New York, 1926.

Randall, James G.Lincoln the President, 4 Vols. New York, 1945–55.

Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. New York, 1977.

Reidy, Joseph P.From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880. Chapel Hill, NC, 1992.

Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877, 7 Vols. New York, 1893–1906.

Richardson, Heather Cox. The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. Cambridge, MA, 1997.

Richardson, Heather CoxThe Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North. Cambridge, MA, 2001.

Richardson, Heather CoxWest from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. New Haven, CT, 2007.

Ringold, May Spencer. The Role of State Legislatures in the Confederacy. Athens, GA, 1966.

Ritter, Gretchen. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America. New York, 1997.

Robertson, Lindsay G.Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York, 2005.

Robinson, Armstead. “Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History.” Journal of American History 68 (1981): 276–97.

Rodrigue, John C.Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880. Baton Rouge, LA, 2001.

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. New York, 1964.

Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. Chapel Hill, NC, 2009.

Ross, Michael A. “Justice Miller’s Reconstruction: The Slaughter House Cases, Health Codes, and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1861–1873.” Journal of Southern History 64 (1998): 649–76.

Ross, Michael A.Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Miller Freeman and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge, LA, 2003a.

Ross, Michael A. “Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the Legal Campaign against Louisiana’s Republican Government, 1868–1873.” Civil War History 49 (2003b): 235–53.

Rubin, Anne S.A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill, NC, 2005.

Ryan, Mary P.Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York, 1981.

Ryan, Mary P.Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA, 1997.

Samito, Christian G.Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era. Ithaca, NY, 2009.

Samito, Christian G., ed. Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader. Carbondale, IL, 2009.

Saville, Julie. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870. New York, 1994.

Schwalm, Leslie A.A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina. Urbana, IL, 1997.

Schwalm, Leslie A.Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest. Chapel Hill, NC, 2009.

Sidali, Silvana. From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862. Baton Rouge, LA, 2005.

Smith, Stacey L.Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Chapel Hill, NC, 2013.

Sommerville, Diane Miller. Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC, 2004.

Spruill, Marjorie Julian. New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States. New York, 1993.

Stampp, Kenneth M.The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. New York, 1965.

Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. New York, 1998.

Steinfeld, Robert J.The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870. Chapel Hill, NC, 1991.

Steinfeld, Robert J.Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 2001.

Stone (Holmes), Sarah Katherine. Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, edited by Anderson, John Q.. Baton Rouge, LA, 1955.

Sutherland, Daniel. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC, 2009.

Syrett, David. The Civil War Confiscation Acts: Failing to Reconstruct the South. New York, 2005.

Thomas, Emory M.The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970.

Thomas, Emory M.The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital. Austin, TX, 1971.

Thomas, Emory M.The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. New York, 1979.

Tomlins, Christopher L.Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York, 1993.

Tomlins, Christopher L.Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. New York, 2010.

Trefousse, Hans L.The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice. New York, 1969.

Trelease, Allen W.White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York, 1971.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York, 1920.

Turner, Frederick JacksonThe United States, 1830–1860: The Nation and Its Sections. New York, 1935.

Vandiver, Frank Everson. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate State: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 26 February 1964. Oxford, 1964.

Van Riper, Paul P. and Scheiber, Harry N.. “The Confederate Civil Service.” Journal of Southern History 25 (1959): 448–70.

Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. New York, 2001.

Wang, Xi. The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910. Athens, GA, 1997.

Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC, 1995.

Waldrep, Christopher. Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80. Urbana, IL, 1998.

Weiner, Jonathan. “AHR Forum: Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865–1955.” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 970–1006.

Weitz, Mark A.More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army. Lincoln, NE, 2005.

Welke, Barbara Young. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920. New York, 2001.

Welke, Barbara YoungLaw and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States. New York, 2010.

Wesley, Charles.The Collapse of the Confederacy. Washington, DC, 1937.

West, Elliott. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York, 2009.

White, G. Edward. “The Origins of Civil Rights in America” (April 15, 2013). Case Western Reserve Law Review, Forthcoming; Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2013–03. Available at SSRN: .

White, Jonathan W.Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman. Baton Rouge, LA, 2011.

White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York, 2011.

Wiecek, William M.The Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Ithaca, NY, 1972.

Wiecek, William M.The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848. Ithaca, NY, 1977.

Williams, Heather. Self–Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill, NC, 2005.

Williams, Lou Falkner. The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872. Athens, GA, 2004.

Wong, Eldie L.Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. New York, 2009.

Woodman, Harold D.New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South. Baton Rouge, LA, 1995.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge, LA, 1951.

Woodward, C. VannThe Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York, 1955.

Yearns, Wilfred Buck. The Confederate Congress. Athens, GA, 1960.

Zackin, Emily. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights. Princeton, NJ, 2014.

Zagarri, Rosemary. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia, 2007.

A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

A Nation of Rights

This Book has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref.

Book description

Awards

Reviews

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-vi

Dedication
pp vii-viii

Contents
pp ix-x

Acknowledgments
pp xi-xii

Introduction
pp 1-15

1 - The United States and Its Use of the People
pp 16-41

2 - The Confederacy and Its Legal Contradictions
pp 42-63

3 - Enslaved Americans, Emancipation, and the Future Legal Order
pp 64-89

4 - The Federal Government and the Reconstruction of the Legal Order
pp 90-119

5 - The Possibilities of Rights
pp 120-145

6 - The Power of Law and the Limits of Rights
pp 146-173

Conclusion
pp 174-176

Bibliographic Essay
pp 177-190

Bibliography
pp 191-204

Index
pp 205-212

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Book summary page views