Description
Book SynopsisAddresses two constitutional issues: first, whether the states in 1860 had a right to secede from the Union and second, what significance slavery had in defining the constitutional Union. These two matters came together when the states seceded on the grounds that the system of government they had agreed to had been violated.
Trade ReviewPeter Radan has produced a very learned defense of secession under the constitutions of 1878 and 1860. The author successfully challenges conventional wisdom that Abraham Lincoln was speaking unquestioned constitutional truth when in his inaugural address he pronounced Southern secession unconstitutional. The constitutional right of a state in 1787 and 1860 to secede from the Union, Radan livingly details, was at least as plausible as the conventional claim that states in 1787 and afterward had no constitutional right to secede from the Union." - Mark A. Graber, Regents Professor, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, and author of Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of the Constitutional Reform after the Civil War
"In this important, pathbreaking book, Peter Radan takes a close look at an idea that has been off-limits for over a hundred years: that the Confederate arguments for secession might have had some merit. With the Civil War fresh in American minds, secessionist arguments had to be branded as heresy, and they were. But now that we have more distance, we can afford to take a new and more objective look. And what we learn about injustices of the past may show the way to a more just future." - Kermit Roosevelt, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and author of The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Glossary
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1. “An Irrepressible Conflict”: Slavery and the Union’ Territorial Expansion
- 2. “An Indestructible Union”: Nationalist and Compact Theories of the Constitution
- 3. “A Peculiar Species of Property”: The Constitution and Slavery
- 4. “The Constitutional Compact Has Been Deliberately Broken”: Constitutional Breaches and the Legal Justification of Secession
- 5. The Final Word
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
