THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: LINCOLN, SLAVERY, and the REFOUNDING of AMERICA (audiobook) by Noah Feldman

 


















Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by the author, Noah Feldman.
Duration: 11 hours, 14 minutes.
Unabridged.

In The Broken Constitution Feldman argues that the Constitution as it was known to Congressman Abraham Lincoln (he served in the Congress from 1847-1849) was already a broken Constitution and maybe had been broken since it had been ratified in 1788. What caused this break? No real surprise - slavery.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Feldman details the compromises that had been in place to induce the Southern states to join a stronger Federal union and how those compromises were re-hashed in the decades that followed in acts like the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Nullification Crisis (1832-33) and the Compromise of 1850. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 only heightened tensions between the slave states and the rest of the union. Feldman's point is that if the Constitution were not already broken, these crises wouldn't have been so dramatic and wouldn't have actually have been crises.

When the Confederate states start seceding after Lincoln's 1860 Presidential election, it was really a continuation of the ongoing series of crises. Feldman details all of those crises and also tells how Lincoln's rising political career was affected by them. 

Feldman then details how Lincoln often broke the rules of the Constitution in the name of restoring U.S. Constitutional government to the Confederate states. Lincoln's political evolution during the war paved the way for the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The 14th Amendment (1868) in particular changed the relationship between the Federal government and the citizens of the United States and made the Federal government the ultimate guarantor of Civil Rights.

This is not a book for readers who are not already very aware of the issues that created all of the crises I mentioned above and eventually caused the Civil War. Feldman spends almost no time talking about the fighting in the war. He assumes the reader knows all about them and can follow along without anything more than a reminder.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It was an interesting take.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: LINCOLN, SLAVERY, and the REFOUNDING of AMERICA by Noah Feldman.

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