Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers' Civil War

by Peter Hoffer

Overview

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 whose side's arguments 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. The eminent legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer's Uncivil Warriors focuses on these lawyers' civil war: on the legal professionals who plotted the course of the war from seats of power, the scenes of battle, and the home front. Both the North and the South had their complement of lawyers, and Hoffer provides coverage of each side's leading lawyers. In positions of leadership, they struggled to make sense of the conflict, and in the course of that struggle, began to glimpse of 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 central of lawyers and the law in America's worst conflict will transform how we think about the Civil War itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190851767
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Charles Hoffer is a Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including Cry Liberty (Oxford).

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Civil War Of, By, and For Lawyers?
Prologue: The Inseparability of Politics and Law: The First Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Chapter One: The Contested Legality of Secession
Chapter Two: A Tale of Two Cabinets and Two Congresses
Chapter Three: In Re Merryman and its Progeny
Chapter Four: Was Secession a Crime?
Chapter Five: An Emancipation Proclamation
Chapter Six: "A New Birth of Freedom"
Epilogue: The Lawyers' Reconstruction
Conclusion: The Lawyers' Civil War in Retrospect

Editorial Reviews

"Uncivil Warriors makes the Civil War seem like a fresh and underexplored topic-no small accomplishment." — Jeremy Weber, Air War College, Air University, H-Net reviews

"Hoffer's explication of the legal conflicts is remarkably clear and perceptive, both in the details of the individual issues and in their significance to a contemporary understanding of what the war was about and what the two sides were fighting for. He raises, and then largely answers, questions that even many Civil War buffs have likely never considered, thus providing a rare fresh approach to a conflict that has been exhaustively surveyed. A worthy addition to the thinking person's Civil War library."—Kirkus

"Peter Hoffer, one of our nation's most prolific and distinguished legal historians, demonstrates the centrality of law, lawyers, and judges to the road to Civil War and the prosecution of the war. In this readable and wide-ranging book we see how southerners tried to make their actions look lawful and how law was used to justify limitations on radical change. This suggests law can bind us together as a nation, and at the same time, constrains how much we can change."—Alfred Brophy, Professor of Law and History, University of Alabama, and author of University, Court, and Slave

"Peter Hoffer's masterful book, Uncivil Warriors, reveals the fascinating and hitherto untold story of the battle of legal minds that took place behind the conflict of arms that is more familiar to readers of American Civil War history."—Don H. Doyle, author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War

"Peter Hoffer breathes new life into the cliche 'the pen is mightier than the sword' by detailing the major role lawyers played during the secession crisis, defining the objects of the Civil War, justifying legal strategies during the Civil War, and on the northern side, developing the constitutional justification for the more powerful regime that emerged in the wake of the Civil War and that regime's commitment to equality."—Mark A. Graber, Regents Professor, Carey School of Law, University of Maryland

"Peter Hoffer's lively and engaging account of the lawyers who shaped the constitutional and political strategies of both the North and South during the Civil War convincingly places law at the center of the conflict. As much as the generals, these lawyers helped determine the outcome of America's most devastating war."—William E. Nelson, Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law and Professor of History, New York University

"A startlingly original work of history . . . Readers will be studying, and debating, Mr. Hoffer's unique scholarship for years-and profiting handsomely." —Harold Holzer, The Wall Street Journal

"Jacobs seems to have written this with an eye to the time between the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the events of 9/11, when it seemed that democracy had finally achieved peace, only to find it widely rejected. His look at how these five figures struggled with similar turns of events is worth pondering." —Library Journal

"Hoffer's explication of the legal conflicts is remarkably clear and perceptive, both in the details of the individual issues and in their significance to a contemporary understanding of what the war was about and what the two sides were fighting for. He raises, and then largely answers, questions that even many Civil War buffs have likely never considered, thus providing a rare fresh approach to a conflict that has been exhaustively surveyed. A worthy addition to the thinking person's Civil War library." —Kirkus

From the Publisher

2018-04-04
An exploration of several legal conundrums of the Civil War.In this slender volume, prolific historian Hoffer (History/Univ. of Georgia; John Quincy Adams and the Gag Rule, 1835-1850, 2017, etc.) considers a variety of legal issues raised by what he calls "a Civil War by lawyers, of lawyers, and in the end, for lawyers." These include the legality of the states' secession, justifications for the suspension of habeas corpus and the use of military courts in civilian areas, the legitimacy of the blockade and the status of ships and cargo seized as blockade runners, the legal basis for the Emancipation Proclamation, and the debate over the extent and nature of the civil rights of freedmen after the war. Two themes run throughout. The first is that the dominance of lawyer-politicians in both governments and in the leadership of the armies rendered this war "unlike civil wars before and after, remarkably rule-bound" and thus far less savage than it might have been. The second is that the war forced a shift away from an earlier constitutional concept of a federal government of severely limited powers; its aftermath "so fundamentally changed the shape of national law and federalism that it created a second constitution." As the author puts it, "the most lasting achievement of the lawyers in the Civil War era was turning that terrible conflict into a new and lasting regime of law." Hoffer's explication of the legal conflicts is remarkably clear and perceptive, both in the details of the individual issues and in their significance to a contemporary understanding of what the war was about and what the two sides were fighting for. He raises, and then largely answers, questions that even many Civil War buffs have likely never considered, thus providing a rare fresh approach to a conflict that has been exhaustively surveyed.A worthy addition to the thinking person's Civil War library.

Kirkus Reviews