A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Laura F. Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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 Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Laura F. Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Christian G. Samito
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809328895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The first comprehensive collection of legal history documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction, this volume shows the profound legal changes that occurred during the Civil War era and highlights how law, society, and politics inextricably mixed and set American legal development on particular paths that were not predetermined. Editor Christian G. Samito has carefully selected excerpts from legislation, public and legislative debates, court cases, investigations of white supremacist violence in the South, and rare court-martial records, added his expert analysis, and illustrated the selections with telling period artwork to create an outstanding resource that demonstrates the rich and important legal history of the era.

Reconstructing Reconstruction

Reconstructing Reconstruction PDF Author: Pamela Brandwein
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822323167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Looks at the contest to construct history, focusing on competing versions of Reconstruction history supported by different factions after the Civil War. The author analyzes how the ultimately dominant version of the history won credence and how that in

The Reconstruction of Southern Debtors

The Reconstruction of Southern Debtors PDF Author: Elizabeth Lee Thompson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820326245
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Based on a careful empirical study of nearly four thousand cases filed in three southern federal districts, this book focuses on how the Bankruptcy Act of 1867 helped shape the course and outcome of Reconstruction. Although passed by a Republican-dominated Congress that was commonly viewed as punitive toward the post-Civil War South, the Bankruptcy Act was a great benefit to southerners. In this first study of the operation of the 1867 Act, Elizabeth Lee Thompson challenges previous works, which maintain that nineteenth-century southerners uniformly opposed federal bankruptcy laws as threatening extensions of federal power. To the contrary, Thompson finds that southerners, faced with the war’s devastation, were more likely to file for bankruptcy than debtors in other parts of the country. The Act thus was the major piece of federal economic legislation that benefited southerners during Reconstruction. Thompson determines that because the vast majority of the Bankruptcy Act’s southern beneficiaries were propertied white men, the legislation served to stabilize and entrench the postwar economic--and thus social and political--power of the sector that included those who were recently leading secessionists and Confederates. Their participation in a federal process, through federal tribunals, during an era of intense white southern opposition to policies emanating from Washington reveals the complex interaction of states' rights ideology and self-interest. However, Thompson shows, white southerners ultimately sacrificed neither in relation to the Bankruptcy Act. After thousands had received economic relief through the statute and the number of filings had slowed to a trickle, southern congressmen supported the Act’s repeal in 1878.

The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory

The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory PDF Author: Bradley R. Clampitt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 080327887X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Indian Territory the Civil War is a story best told through shades of gray rather than black and white or heroes and villains. Since neutrality appeared virtually impossible, the vast majority of territory residents chose a side, doing so for myriad reasons and not necessarily out of affection for either the Union or the Confederacy. Indigenous residents found themselves fighting to protect their unusual dual status as communities distinct from the American citizenry yet legal wards of the federal government. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory is a nuanced and authoritative examination of the layers of conflicts both on and off the Civil War battlefield. It examines the military front and the home front; the experiences of the Five Nations and those of the agency tribes in the western portion of the territory; the severe conflicts between Native Americans and the federal government and between Indian nations and their former slaves during and beyond the Reconstruction years; and the concept of memory as viewed through the lenses of Native American oral traditions and the modern evolution of public history. These carefully crafted essays by leading scholars such as Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Clarissa Confer, Richard B. McCaslin, Linda W. Reese, and F. Todd Smith will help teachers and students better understand the Civil War, Native American history, and Oklahoma history.

A New Birth of Freedom

A New Birth of Freedom PDF Author: W. Thomas Minahan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781480854253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The American Civil War (1861-1865), was the most traumatic event in this country's history. To win the war, the Northern states ceded enormous power to the federal government. However, the paradigm shift in federal-state relations occurred during the Reconstruction Era of 1863 to 1877. A New Birth of Freedom, by author W. Thomas Minahan, examines that paradigm shift that occurred in Ohio during this time. The beginning chapters explore Ohio's early political, social, and legal history and how the state grew to become a social microcosm of the entire country by 1860. The later chapters examine the changes to the political, social, and legal climate in the country, and particularly in the Buckeye State, during the 1860s and 1870s. Offering a comprehensive discussion of the effects of the Civil War and reconstruction on the development of Ohio state law, A New Birth of Freedom provides both historical detail on the antecedents to the law as well as an analysis of how federal and state constitutions evolved through the turn of the nineteenth century. It discusses the central role Ohio and Ohioans played in securing the future of the United States.

The Civil War and Reconstruction

The Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Stanley Harrold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405156643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This new volume deals with two momentous and interrelated events in American history —the American Civil War and Reconstruction—and offers students a collection of essential documentary sources for these periods. Provides students with over 60 documents on the American Civil War and Reconstruction Includes presidential addresses, official reports, songs, poems, and a variety of eyewitness testimony concerning significant events ranging from 1833-1879 Contains an informative introduction focused on the kinds of materials available and how historians use them Each chapter ends with questions designed to help students engage with the material and to highlight key issues of historical debate

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution PDF Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era

A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era PDF Author: Thomas C. Mackey
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621900231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is the first comprehensive collection of public policy actions, political speeches, and judicial decisions related to the American Civil War. Collectively, the four volumes in this series give scholars, teachers, and students easy access to the full texts of the most important, fundamental documents as well as hard-to-find, rarely published primary sources on this critical period in U.S. history. The first two volumes of the series, Legislative Achievements and Political Arguments, were released last year. The final installments, Judicial Decisions, is split into two volumes, with this one, volume 3, spanning from 1857 to 1866. It contains some of the classic judicial decisions of the time such as the 1857 decision in Dred Scott and the 1861 Ex parte Merryman decision. Other decisions are well known to specialists but deserve wider readership and discussion, such as the October 1859 Jefferson County, Virginia, indictment of John Brown and the decision in the 1864 case of political and seditious activity in Ex parte Vallandigham. These judicial voices constitute a lasting and often overlooked aspect of the age of Abraham Lincoln. Mackey’s headnotes and introductory essays situate cases within their historical context and trace their lasting significance. In contrast to the war, these judicial decisions lasted well past their immediate political and legal moment and deserve continued scholarship and scrutiny. This document collection presents the raw “stuff” of the Civil War era so that students, scholars, and interested readers can measure and gauge how that generation met Lincoln’s challenge to “think anew, and act anew.” A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a valuable resource for courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, political history, and nineteenth-century American history.

A New Birth of Freedom

A New Birth of Freedom PDF Author: W. Thomas Minahan
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480854247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The American Civil War (1861-1865), was the most traumatic event in this countrys history. To win the war, the Northern states ceded enormous power to the federal government. However, the paradigm shift in federal-state relations occurred during the Reconstruction Era of 1863 to 1877. A New Birth of Freedom, by author W. Thomas Minahan, examines that paradigm shift that occurred in Ohio during this time. The beginning chapters explore Ohios early political, social, and legal history and how the state grew to become a social microcosm of the entire country by 1860. The later chapters examine the changes to the political, social, and legal climate in the country, and particularly in the Buckeye State, during the 1860s and 1870s. Offering a comprehensive discussion of the effects of the Civil War and reconstruction on the development of Ohio state law, A New Birth of Freedom provides both historical detail on the antecedents to the law as well as an analysis of how federal and state constitutions evolved through the turn of the nineteenth century. It discusses the central role Ohio and Ohioans played in securing the future of the United States.