Name: The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, Paperback/Noah Feldman
Brand: Picador USA
Price: 111.99 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

A 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 document was best understood as a compromise pact--a rough-and-ready deal that allowed the Union to be forged from a disparate collection of states. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text--a transcendent statement of the nation's highest ideals. This happened because of the choices Lincoln made in dramatic circumstances; as violence raged, he variously ignored, reviled, and revised long-standing beliefs and set the country on a new path. Approaching the Civil War from a fresh angle, Feldman offers a riveting narrative