Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War by Mark E. Neely Jr. (review)

No one doubts that the Civil War was a constitutional crisis of the first order. Yet, much of the discussion about the war’s constitutional aspects has centered on First Amendment issues and the suspension of habeas corpus. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Mark Neely Jr. broadens the scope of constitutional issues, asking how interpretations of this foundational document either aided or impeded the effort to save the Union. In examining the constitutional problems Abraham Lincoln confronted, Neely seeks to overturn the arguments James Randall makes in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln.

Neely argues that the war presented Republicans with a problem. It strained the Constitution on multiple fronts, not just over issues of dissent and free speech. Issues such as raising an army, issuing paper currency, and adopting an income tax demanded that Republicans treat the Constitution as a flexible document, not as a “national inconvenience” that should be suspended in wartime (9). Their policies, of course, sparked angry denunciations from Peace Democrats, who, as constitutional fundamentalists, regarded many of the Republicans’ programs as patently illegal.

Strongly influenced by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Neely brings a second dimension to his analysis: nationalism. He argues that the Whig agenda and the American System deeply influenced Lincoln’s ideas about nationalism. This program required a broad interpretation of the Constitution, and Neely argues that Lincoln’s political beliefs, rather than his training as a lawyer, were the dominant force in shaping his understanding of the Constitution. With a predisposition to regard it as a flexible document, once in office “Lincoln was good at scouring the Constitution to find in it previously hidden powers,” Neely writes (58).

This ability led to many and varied claims of authority. Neely pays particularly close attention to the suspension of habeas corpus and conscription, but no constitutional issue has more import than the Emancipation Proclamation. The constitutional challenges related to the proclamation are well documented—Lincoln needed to draw on his powers as commander in chief and issue it as a war measure—but Neely points out that another, less examined problem threatened the proclamation, too: racism. This was overcome largely by soldiers who were going into winter quarters when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect; they had plenty of time to read the newspapers and contemplate the actions of the copperheads who had done so well in the November 1862 off-year election. They were far more upset by the Democrats than emancipation, and swung behind Lincoln. “Treason, not race, was on their minds,” Neely says. “Nationalism simply trumped racism” (155).

This focus on nationalism has great promise but is vexing in its delivery, particularly given its importance in Neely’s thesis. The author does not provide an adequate definition of his own understanding of nationalism, its characteristics (apart from alluding to Anderson), or how it differed from old-fashioned patriotism, to which it often seems to be analogous in Neely’s usage. He suggests that patriotism and nationalism are different because “the Constitution sits at the boundary” between them, but he does not elaborate (9). Nor does he examine at any length the history of nationalism in the North, other than saying “an atmosphere of nationalism” followed the War of 1812 (30). As he is one of the period’s leading scholars, I would have been very interested in his thoughts on this, especially since when Americans came to define themselves as such remains subject to debate. For instance, John Murrin has argued that the Constitution provided something for Americans to believe in before they came to identify themselves as Americans, and the Civil War established the citizens’ loyalties to the nation over those to their states. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville believed that Americans’ loyalties still lay with their states before the Union.²

Neely draws...