Description: Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Nation of Rights explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering Americans' relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated. Ultimately, Laura F. Edwards argues that this new nation of rights offered up promises that would prove difficult to sustain.
Brief description: Laura F. Edwards is the Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University, North Carolina. Her book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South was awarded the American Historical Association's 2009 Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in law and society and the Southern Historical Association's Charles Sydnor Prize for the best book in Southern history.
Review Quotes: "Bold, brilliant, and sweeping, this concise history places the transformation of American law at the center of the Civil War. In clear analysis of constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions, expanding wartime powers, and everyday people's bold claims, Edwards shows that a war fought to preserve a legal order ended up almost entirely remaking it. The legal dismantling of American slavery not only extended rights to new people but also reconfigured what rights meant and why they were so central to the new American nation that the war made."
Gregory Downs, City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York