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This book asserts that the Civil War marks the end of one era of American legal history, and the beginning of another. Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysberg Address is viewed as the beginning of a new kind of “covert” constitutional law – one with a stronger emphasis on equality in the wake of the abolition of slavery – which was legally established in the Amendments made to the U.S. Constitution between 1865 and 1870. The author asserts that the influence of this “secret constitution”, which has varied in degree from Reconstruction to the present day, is visible in the rulings of the Supreme Court on issues hinging on personal freedom, equality, and discrimination.

During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. This book challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, it argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly nonpartisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of antiparty discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. This book offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the “party period paradigm” in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As this book shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

Through informative case studies, this illuminating book remaps considerations of the Civil War and reconstruction era by charting the ways in which the needs, interests, and experiences of going to war, fighting it, and making sense of it informed and directed politics, public life, social change, and cultural memory after the war's end. In doing so, it shows that the war did not actually end with Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination in Washington. As the chapters show, major issues remained, including defining freedom; rebuilding the South; integrating women and blacks into postwar society, culture, and politics; deciding the place of the military in public life; demobilizing or redeploying soldiers; organizing a new party system; and determining the scope and meanings of union.

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-19th century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to expand and then preserve it, the United States looked across the Atlantic for investment capital. The need to obtain foreign capital greatly influenced American foreign policy, principally relations with Britain. The intersection of finance and diplomacy was particularly evident during the Civil War when both the North and South integrated attempts to procure loans from European banks into their larger international strategies. Furthermore, the financial needs of the United States (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period. This study explores and assesses how the United State's need for capital influenced its foreign relations in the tumultuous years wedged between the two great financial crises of the 19th century, 1837 to 1873. Drawing on the unused archives of London banks and the papers of statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, this work illuminates our understanding of mid-19th-century American foreign relations by highlighting how financial considerations influenced the formation of foreign policy and functioned as a peace factor in Anglo-American relations. This study also analyses a crucial, but ignored, dimension of the Civil War — the efforts of both the North and the South to attract the support of European financiers. Though foreign contributions to each side failed to match the hopes of Union and Confederate leaders, the financial diplomacy of the Civil War shaped the larger foreign policy strategies of both sides and contributed to both the preservation of British neutrality and the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy.

Latin epics such as Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, and Statius' Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. This book argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society. Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, it highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, the book closes its case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

This examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil. The book explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North's attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, the book explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it.

This book traces the emergence and development of the American jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that laments the nation's decline from a virtuous past and calls it to repentance and renewal. Employed by Americans of all political persuasions since the earliest days of settlement, the jeremiad has proven to be a powerful way of invoking the American past in order to chart a brighter American future. Part I of the book focuses on three especially important episodes in the jeremiad's history: early New England, Civil War America, and the rise of the Christian Right. Part II provides a critical analysis of the jeremiad's role in the American “culture wars” and politics more generally. In seeking to place the American past in the service of the American future, the book argues, the jeremiad takes not one form, but two: a traditionalist jeremiad whose view of the past depends heavily on claims about how things used to be, and emphasizes the importance of preserving concrete aspects of the past as we move toward an uncertain future; and a progressive jeremiad, which views the past as a repository of emancipatory principles articulated at the founding but never fully realized in practice. Acknowledging that both traditionalist and progressive jeremiads are deeply entwined with the nation's history, the book concludes with a call for a revived progressive jeremiad as most compatible with the deep diversity—cultural, religious, political, philosophical—that characterizes American society at the dawn of the twenty‐first century.

This volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains seventeen lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2007. Subject matter ranges from commemoration of the American Civil War, to an examination of our capacity as human beings to live in the world of imagination, and the opportunities and challenges that face cultural institutions in Britain today.

This book looks at how Lincoln confronted the central issues of the Civil War era, throwing new light on the revolutionary changes he helped usher in. The book explores the issue of self-determination, illuminating Lincoln's views and comparing the South's struggle for independence to others in history (including the post-Soviet situation in Eastern Europe). One chapter offers a provocative comparison of how Lincoln and America's other outstanding war president, FDR, went beyond the limits of the Constitution in defense of the nation and freedom—as they understood them. Another chapter focuses on both the exhilarating moment of emancipation and its disappointing results. A further chapter traces Lincoln's transition from strident opponent of the Mexican War, to resolute war leader (“Destroy the rebel army,” were his terse orders), to speaking out for reconciliation (after Appomattox he exclaimed, “Enemies, never again must we repeat that word”). The next chapter compares the Civil War as a successful attempt at true national unification with the unifications of Italy, Germany, and even Switzerland (which waged a fraternal war not many years earlier). A later chapter provides an incisive look at the premonitions of Civil War that haunted the American republic since independence, including Lincoln's reluctance to accept war as a possibility. Finally, the book establishes once and for all Lincoln's brilliance as a national strategist.

Many studies have been written on the Greek Civil War's political causes, characteristics, and repercussions, but Greece's theater history of those years seems to have been largely forgotten. This is unfortunate because the events of those decades have shaped the native Greek stage as well as the revival stage ever since. The theatrical debate then mirrored the contemporary turmoil and brought forth new readings of the ancient plays. This book introduces the classical performances that were staged by the political prisoners on the prison islands of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s through 1950s) and that became part of the important battle waged between the Greek Left and the Right for the stakes of the sociopolitical order. These performances open an alternative, culturally‐oriented perspective on the internecine military and political struggle at the onset of the Cold War. The book first explains the historical and political context in which the productions of ancient drama originated, the selections made by the prisoners, and the practical conditions under which the performances were mounted. It devotes ample attention, too, to acts of censorship exacted by the prison authorities. The book's main focus, however, is on the interpretation that the political detainees gave to their productions and to the rationale behind specific readings. Lastly, the book features an Antigone adaptation in the original Greek and in English translation that was written by Aris Alexandrou, one of the prisoners, and that extends the political and ideological spectrum of the classicizing productions.

This book, which offers a comprehensive narrative of Soviet and Communist intervention in the revolution and civil war in Spain, documents in detail Soviet strategies, Comintern activities, and the role of the Communist party in Spain from the early 1930s to the end of the civil war in 1939. Drawing on a very broad range of Soviet and Spanish primary sources, including many only recently available, it changes our understanding of Soviet and Communist intentions in Spain, of Stalin's decision to intervene in the Spanish war, of the widely accepted characterization of the conflict as the struggle of fascism against democracy, and of the claim that Spain's war constituted the opening round of World War II. The author arrives at a new view of the Spanish Civil War and concludes not only that the Democratic Republic had many undemocratic components but also that the position of the Communist party was by no means counterrevolutionary.