Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War

Notes

Notes Prologue 1 See, e.g., Woden Teachout’s Capture the Flag. Her title gave me the term used in the title of this prologue. 2 Weakly observed in scattered places today, “Constitution Day” is hardly the equal of the other famous holidays. For a time in the twentieth century it was touted as an anticommunist landmark on the calendar. On its conservative meaning, see Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 220–23, 385. 3 Harrisburg Patriot and Union, August 16, 1862. Though noted in history for his insistent insertion of race as an issue into political rhetoric in Pennsylvania during the war, Hughes sought other resonant themes around which to revive the Democratic Party in the state. See Dusinberre, Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 139, 179. 4 Harrisburg Patriot and Union, September 18, 1862. 5 Pittsburgh Post, September 19, 1862. 6 Pittsburgh Post, August 20, 1863. 7 Pittsburgh Post, September 18, 19, 21, 1863. 8 Pittsburgh Post, September 23, 1863. 9 New York Herald, September 19, 1864. 10 George B. McClellan to Samuel S. Cox, February 12, 1864, in Sears, Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 565. 11 Pittsburgh Post, September 26, 1868 (weekly ed.). 12 Pittsburgh Post, September 17, 18, 1868. 13 Pittsburgh Post, September 16, 17, 18, 1872. 14 This is the point of Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself. 15 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 72, 106. 16 Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, 449–56. I am indebted to Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties , esp. 56, for analysis of Jefferson’s position. 17 Peterson, Jefferson: Writings, 449. 18 Schlesinger, History of American Presidential Elections, 2:953. 19 Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 24, 1864. 20 Pittsburgh Post, September 19, 1862. 21 Neely, Boundaries of American Political Culture, 88. 22 Harrisburg Patriot and Union, August 16, 1862. 23 Pittsburgh Post, September 23, 1863. 24 National Intelligencer, September 29, 1864. 25 That is substantially the point of Hyman, A More Perfect Union. 26 For the motto’s first use during the war, see the report of the Union rally in the New York Herald, April 21, 1861. 27 For these distinctions, see Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, chaps. 4, 5. 28 For the use of that term, see Anderson, Imagined Communities. 29 Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 165. 30 Lawson, Patriot Fires, 164. 352 Notes to Pages 12–16 31 New York Evening Post, July 8, 1863. On loyalty scares, see Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 130–50. 32 New York Evening Post, July 8, 1863. 33 On the importance of these somewhat neglected elections, see Holt, “An Elusive Synthesis ,” 123. 34 Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 30, 1864. 35 Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 5, 1864. 36 Ibid. 37 I myself made the mistake of so framing the question until I read Benedict Anderson ’s Imagined Communities. See, e.g., Neely, “Abraham Lincoln’s Nationalism Reconsidered .” 38 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141. Introduction 1 John W. Burgess’s two-volume work comes immediately to mind, but it was actually a narrative history of the Civil War with one chapter in the second volume entitled “Interpretation of the Constitution under the Stress of the Military Events of 1862 and 1863” and another five-page chapter on “The President’s Order Executing the Emancipation Proclamation.” He devoted four paragraphs of the two-volume study to the Confederate Constitution, focusing most of his attention on the provision in the document forbidding the reopening of the African slave trade. See Burgess, Civil War and the Constitution, esp. 1:117–19. Nevins, Robertson, and Wiley, in Civil War Books, 1:107, accurately describe it as “heavy on the military and political history of the war.” 2 Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, American Constitution, for example, a standard modern text and an exemplary one, devotes one of thirty-six chapters3—3fewer than thirty pages3—3 to the Civil War. Within that space, the authors offer six paragraphs (pp. 186–87) on the provisions of the Confederate document but afterward simply nothing about its development over the eventful four-year history of the Confederacy. The text studies the “origin and development” of the “American Constitution.” An excellent brief text, Benedict, Blessings of Liberty, treats the Confederacy only as an object of Union policies ; it provides no discussion of America’s “other” Constitution or its development. 3 Hyman, A More Perfect Union, 104. 4 Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, first appeared in 1926. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray, the most recent history (2010), offers a “legal history...