Similarly, the phrase “the same protection of laws” articulated in the Fourteenth Amendment has resonated with generations of Americans, as it should. As an expression of the fundamental ideals of the American political creed, it stands on an equal footing with “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “We the People.” And yet, as Edwards repeatedly notes in his analysis, noting, as they did in good faith, strictly formalistic legal equality, while almost deliberately ignoring the effects of the profound racial, class, and sexual inequalities and hierarchies that represented the essential reality of American society, the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment codified these inequalities. and made it even less likely that such inequalities could be meaningfully addressed by law or order. Almost by definition, according to this understanding of rights, all initiatives that attempted to address historical inequalities could be nullified as special exemptions or favoritism, as a plea by certain groups for an unfair advantage and thus as a violation of the rights of others. The relevance of this point to current discussions on affirmative action or other similar programmes should be quite obvious. This notion of rightism manifested itself in many ways in the decades following the Civil War, when the efforts of African Americans, women, workers, and American Indians, who were generally collective in nature to achieve their own understanding of freedom or justice, were defeated or suppressed. sometimes ruthlessly. However, it is important to note that these findings were not the byproduct of a deep and dark conspiracy concocted by traditional elites or other beneficiaries of fundamental inequalities in American life. Instead, they resulted from the logic of a legal system formulated in such radically individualistic terms. In A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Laura Edwards combines a brilliant synthesis of decades of science with original ideas and analyses. It vividly shows how the social upheavals and dreadful politics of the Civil War era reshaped the nation`s legal order and Americans` ideas about the importance of rights. The American Civil War changed the American nation.

By increasing federal supremacy and limiting state authority, the relative balance of constitutional authority, called federalism, has been fundamentally altered. As much as the war was a contest of arms, it was a clash of ideas and visions of America. The hostilities have stimulated reflection, discussion and action on what the United States is as a legal system, and perhaps even more, says Laura F. Edwards, about what the United States and its legal system should look like. Finally, a number of important decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court in the last decades of the nineteenth century – the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), Cruickshank (1876), the Civil Rights Cases (1883), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and others have often been seen both as the result of the “nation`s withdrawal from reconstruction” and as a central cause of the failure of reconstruction. In addition, a number of other important cases, which are not directly related to reconstruction, are said to have contributed to this failure. “In fact, conventional historiographical wisdom has placed much of the blame for the failure of reconstruction on the feet of the U.S.

Supreme Court,” Edwards writes, as the court limits federal efforts to uphold civil rights, particularly in the South. And while recent research, she continues, “has moderated these conclusions,” it has nonetheless been the case over these decades that “the court has maintained a narrow and individualized view of civil rights that is contrary to the aspirations of many Americans” (pp. 161-162). In all of these cases, as Edwards points out, the problem was not so much, in one way or another, a lack of will in the enforcement of civil rights, as is often said. On the contrary, the problem was an overzealousness — though still based on good faith — in applying a definition of rights so narrow that it is of limited use to most ordinary Americans. Although hundreds of thousands of people died during the Civil War, perhaps the greatest casualty of the war was the nation`s legal system. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this great change by putting the history of law in dialogue with the science of other historical fields. The federal policy on slavery and race, especially the three reconstruction amendments, were the best-known legal innovations of the time.

However, the change permeated all levels of the legal system, changing Americans` relationship with the law and allowing them to shift popular notions of justice into the realm of government policy. The results connected Americans to the nation through individual rights that were extended to more people and redesigned due to new demands to cover a wider range of issues. But rights had limits in what they could achieve, especially when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans defended. Edwards offers concise and insightful summaries of science on a variety of topics and issues related to the legal consequences of the Civil War and the end of slavery, and the book is full of sharp observations. It is also deceptively short. Although it contains only 176 pages of text, the reader must stop after almost every paragraph to reflect on the author`s point of view. Although this journal can explore a variety of topics that the book skillfully addresses, three are of particular importance to the current historiography of the legal dimensions of the Civil War period: the legal problem of emancipation; the difficulties of grafting the principle of “equality before the law” after the war onto the various forms of inequality woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century American life; and the implications of some of the important U.S. Supreme Court cases arising from the conflicts on reconstruction and its role in the ultimate “failure” of reconstruction. “An excellent synthesis. Edwards challenges traditional and revisionist narratives while putting legal history in dialogue with science, which ranges from the Dunning School of the early 1900s to the present day. It provides new perspectives on old issues, for example by explaining the irony of centralization in the Confederate federal government. In addition, it offers captivating perspectives that go beyond the period from 1861 to 1877 by pointing out the mistake of merging the federal government with the nation, thereby simplifying governance within the nation, and constantly reminding readers that the nation`s history is one of the ongoing conflicts that reflects the aspirations of the American people in all its contradictory possibilities.

Questions as fundamental as who was an American citizen, what it meant to be an American citizen and who decided who was an American citizen had few firm answers in 1861, Edwards notes. In order to answer such questions, it was necessary to resolve disputes that dated back at least to the debates on the design of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Filling in the gaps proved complicated, as responses to controversial notions about the role of government in the United States, the place and use of the “people” in the U.S. government, the importance of personal rights and civil and political equality, the limits of rights, and the power of the law, as Edwards explains in his introduction, six chapters and conclusion. Potential readers of this book should not be misled by the somewhat dull title. In A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights, Laura F. Edwards provided a relatively brief but concise synthesis of recent historical literature on civil war and reconstruction, focusing on the legal consequences of emancipation. In doing so, it also advances its own original – and ultimately convincing – argument. Curiously, the subtitle probably gives a better indication of the subject and content of the book than the title (and one wonders if the title and subtitle should perhaps have been reversed).

In addition, the chronological framework of the book, whatever its title, transcends the era of civil war and reconstruction, extending to the early years of the twentieth century. Edwards wrote a volume that would benefit scholars of the Civil War period, interpreted broadly, the Golden Age and the late nineteenth century, as well as legal and constitutional history. Edwards` main argument is that the Civil War and the abolition of slavery led to a fundamental transformation of the entire legal and constitutional order of the nation, from the national to the local level.