Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Old Regime
- 1 The Post-War Constitution
- 2 The Judiciary and Private Rights
- 3 The Crisis of the 1890s
- Part II Early Progressivism
- Part III Late Progressivism
- Part IV The New Deal
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Primary Sources
- Index
- References
1 - The Post-War Constitution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The Old Regime
- 1 The Post-War Constitution
- 2 The Judiciary and Private Rights
- 3 The Crisis of the 1890s
- Part II Early Progressivism
- Part III Late Progressivism
- Part IV The New Deal
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Primary Sources
- Index
- References
Summary
REPUBLICAN LEVIATHAN
Abraham Lincoln told Congress at the outset of the Civil War, “Our popular government had often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.” The Union government put down the rebellion within the limits established by the original Constitution. And the abolition of slavery made the original Constitution more perfect. But scholars still claim that the Republican party used the war to establish a “leviathan state,” or at least its prototype. Charles and Mary Beard advanced this argument in their 1927 classic, The Rise of American Civilization, calling the Civil War the “second American Revolution.” They depicted the Civil War as a clash of economic classes, resembling late republican Rome, the seventeenth-century “bourgeois” English Civil War, or the French Revolution. The Republicans furthered this revolution through the non-military legislation of the Civil War Congresses – the protective tariff, banking legislation, railroad promotion, and contract labor law, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment and the federal judicial power. The “Second American Revolution,” the Beards claimed, brought about the triumph of “the party of industrial progress and sound money.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The American State from the Civil War to the New DealThe Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism, pp. 7 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013