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"Postwar reconstruction Law and legislation United States History 19th century."
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Uncivil warriors : the lawyers' civil war
\" In the Civil War, the United States and the Confederate States of America engaged in combat to defend distinct legal regimes and the social order they embodied and protected. Depending on which side has an argument that one accepted, the Constitution either demanded the Union's continuance or allowed for its dissolution. After the war began, rival legal concepts of insurrection (a civil war within a nation) and belligerency (war between sovereign enemies) vied for adherents in federal and Confederate councils. In a \"nation of laws,\" such martial legalism was not surprising. Moreover, many of the political leaders of both the North and the South were lawyers themselves, including Abraham Lincoln. These lawyers now found themselves at the center of this violent maelstrom. For these men, as for their countrymen in the years following the conflict, the sacrifices of the war gave legitimacy to new kinds of laws defining citizenship and civil rights. Uncivil Warriors focuses on these lawyers' civil war: the legal professionals who plotted the course of the war from seats of power, the scenes of battle, and the home front. Both sides in the Civil War had their complement of lawyers, and eminent legal historian Peter Hoffer, provides coverage of both sides' leading lawyers. In positions of leadership, they struggled to make sense of the conflict and, in the course of that struggle, they began to glimpse into a new world of law. It was a law that empowered as well as limited government, a law that conferred personal dignity and rights on those who, at the war's beginning, could claim neither in law. Comprehensive in coverage, Uncivil Warriors focus on the legal side of America's worst conflict will reshape our understanding of the Civil War itself. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Colfax massacre : the untold story of Black power, White terror, and the death of Reconstruction
Here is the first full-length book to tell the history of the Colfax massacre. Drawing on a huge body of documents, including eyewitness accounts as well as newly discovered evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the fateful encounter, during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered, and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South. Keith also recounts the heroic attempts by U.S. Attorney J.R. Beckwith to bring the killers to justice and the many legal issues raised by the massacre. In 1875, disregarding the poignant testimony of 300 witnesses, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.S. v. Cruikshank to overturn a lower court conviction of eight conspirators. This decision virtually nullified the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871--which had made federal offenses of a variety of acts to intimidate voters and officeholders--and cleared the way for the Jim Crow era.
eBook
The Politics of Judicial Interpretation
This landmark work of Constitutional and legal history is the leading account of the ways in which federal judges, attorneys, and other law officers defined a new era of civil and political rights in the South and implemented the revolutionary 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction. Should be required reading . . . for all historians, jurists, lawyers, political scientists, and government officials who in one way or another are responsible for understanding and interpreting our civil rights past.-Harold M. Hyman, Journal of Southern HistoryImportant, richly researched. . . . the fullest account now available.-American Journal of Legal History
eBook