The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, And The Refounding Of America, by Noah Feldman

When I first began reading this book, I was at least mildly sympathetic to the author’s argument that Lincoln sought to transform the meaning of the American constitution by reforging it with a moral commitment to freedom from slavery. By the end of the book, I was deeply alarmed by where the author was choosing to go, and what he saw as the moral purposes of government and the ability of government, ruled by self-righteous moral activists like himself, to impose their vision of what is right on a potentially wary and hostile majority. This is a book where the author holds his cards very closely to his vest, providing a repellant Machiavellian view of Lincoln’s violations of fundamental freedoms for the ends of preserving the government and eventually of providing freedom. The author, like many, considers the failure of the Reconstruction Amendments to provide for racial justice as a sign of failure, and absolutely abhors the sort of compromising and forbearance that is necessary to get along with people, which bodes ill for the long-term health of our own republic in the present day. This is not a book to read lightly, and its difficult legal and historical reasoning only becomes clear at the very end, when the author seeks to apply Lincoln’s own potentially dictatorial behavior to what he considers to be the desirable efforts to enforce a leftist cultural revolution on unwilling conservative Americans.

This book, despite being a bit more than 300 pages of material, only contains 5 chapters. Each of these chapters is long and exceedingly complex, and if one cannot trust the author’s view of Lincoln, one sees in it the mirror image of those who see in Lincoln’s robust defense of the Union as a horrific betrayal of libertarian ideals the longing of the author to apply those same vigorous defenses to the control of the government by others of his ilk. The book begins with a short introduction that discusses the contradictions of the compromise constitution that was formed in 1787 that broke under the weight of increasing sectional tensions between north and south. The first chapter is devoted to discussing the compromises that were made between North and South and the results that these compromises, and the arguments over what they meant, had on the populace and politics of the regions over the course of the first part of the 19th century (1). This is followed by a discussion of the breaking constitution that resulted from the unwillingness of Northern whites to abide by the demands of Southern slaveowners to allow slavery to freely spread through the United States and to willingly serve as slavecatchers for runaway slaves (2). The author then turns to the choice of war, and to the question of whether, by the Constitution of 1787, the Union had the right to violently crush the rebellion of the Confederacy (3). This is followed by a discussion of the political prisoners of the Civil War and Lincoln’s controversial suspension of the writ of habeus corpus and his suppression of the freedom of the press of hostile newspapers (4). This is followed by a discussion of the view that emancipation provided a moral basis to the Constitution that made it a fit object of veneration and respect. The book then ends with a brief and somewhat shocking conclusion, notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

While it is not at all difficult to find books written by libertarian-leaning authors who decry Lincoln’s dictatorial behavior and consider the Union effort to coerce the South back into the Union as illegitimate, this book flips such libertarian arguments on their head, arguing that Lincoln was a dictator for righteousness and that this was indeed a good thing, and worthy of emulation by someone who similarly has the strength of will to coerce recalcitrant Americans and rule without consent of the governed to force a new birth of freedom where no moral restraints are permitted, no criticism of any conduct on biblical ground, no opposition permitted to the “current thing” that the author and his fellow travelers wish to enforce on an unwilling American populace whose freedoms are to be drastically curtailed as a result of the moral purity of the leftist controlling class. This book is a threat, mostly veiled until the ending, that the behavior of Lincoln was a necessary means to an end, an end of forcing an unwilling America into enlightenment and truth that it would be unwilling to achieve without force. I am not on board with that.