Description
Book SynopsisA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer.
When Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency in 1861, the United States' constitutional arrangements were not the ones we know today. It was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that it had no authority over slavery in states where the institution existed and that basic civil liberties could not be suspended during a rebellion without the consent of Congress. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, deliberately and repeatedly violating the United States' founding principles. To what end? How did Lincoln understand the Constitution and how did he transform it?
In The Broken Constitution, Noah Feldman tells the full story of how Lincoln tore up the Constitution in order to save it. Prior to the Civil War, the docume
