The first comprehensive collection of legal history documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction, this volume shows the profound legal changes that occurred during the Civil War era and highlights how law, society, and politics inextricably mixed and set American legal development on particular paths that were not predetermined. Editor Christian G. Samito carefully selected excerpts from legislation, public and legislative debates, and rare court-martial records, added his expert analysis to clearly present the key facts, and illustrated the selections with telling period artwork to create an outstanding resource that clearly demonstrates the rich and important legal history of the era.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States experienced long-lasting and significant constitutional and societal reform. This critical period forced the government and the American people to confront the contours of presidential power and consider the boundaries of civil liberties during wartime. Samito demonstrates how legislation fueled national development, furthered the centralization and expansion of the federal government, revolutionized and nationalized the banking system, and promoted the coercive power of the government as well as its role in taking care of its citizens. The law of slavery gave way to the hard-fought struggle for black equality while Americans struggled over how to implement the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

The materials in this volume demonstrate that legal development is not a story of linear progression. They illuminate themes of fluidity, contingency, and participation, and bring forth the theoretical and personal aspects of the law. Samito focuses on such topics as blacks in the North and South before the Civil War, the expansion of governmental power and the nationalization of the Union, blacks and the U.S. military, President Lincoln’s constitutionalism, the expansion of civil rights and opposition to them, and judicial interpretation of the Civil War Amendments and civil rights legislation.

The Civil War Amendments and other legislation afforded African Americans national citizenship and began to define some of the rights and practices associated with that status, but, as Samito makes evident, the potential of this reformative moment eroded in the face of Southern white resistance as well as the judicial limitation of the Civil War Amendments. Nonetheless, the theoretical arguments and practical changes during this era set valuable precedents and influenced future arguments over these same issues. Through this exciting collection, readers will come to understand how the issues of the 1860s are, in many cases, the same issues Americans debate today.