Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era by Herman Belz

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Was Lincoln a dictator, albeit benign? Was he a revolutionary nationalist, casting aside constitutional forms and procedures and paving the way for a twentieth-century “imperial presidency”? Or was he a constitutional chief executive who, even in the nation's darkest hour of crisis, operated within the limits imposed by the Founding Fathers? Was Reconstruction a revolutionary repudiation of the Constitution, or a legitimate amendment thereof?

This book, by one of the nation’s leading constitutional historians, analyzes the nature and tendency of American Constitutionalism during the nation’s greatest political crisis. In a series of related essays, Herman Belz combines detailed narrative with probing judicial analysis of the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, his exercise of executive power, and the application of the equality principle which would become a central issue during Reconstruction. Belz’s essays are interdisciplinary in their approach, combining history, political science, and jurisprudence to study the political and constitutional climate and the changes which occurred under Lincoln during and after the war. Belz studies Lincoln as the focus of both contemporary political controversy and subsequent historical debate over the conservative or revolutionary character of Civil War Constitutionalism. He explores the politically controversial nature of the equality principle that lay at the heart of the slavery struggle and its resolution in wartime emancipation.