Constitutional scholar Noah Feldman (The Three Lives of James Madison) reveals a surprisingly iconoclastic Abraham Lincoln in his provocative study The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America. Many books have traced the evolution of Lincoln's legal and political thinking, but none argues as effectively that Lincoln took a hammer to the Founding Fathers' Constitution to create a new, moral Constitution placing freedom and equality above the tired "mechanism of compromise" that characterized its predecessor.
Prior to the Civil War, the Constitution had "a different meaning and different functions... than it did afterward," the main one being to preserve the Union and its capacity to expand through a delicate Congressional balance of power between North and South. While Lincoln supported the "compromise Constitution" of slavery for much of his public life, his thinking underwent fundamental shifts as president. The original Constitution was based upon a "cold reason" that required many immoral compromises over slavery, but Feldman claims that after the South "broke" the Constitution via secession, Lincoln felt free to do some breaking of his own. Wielding the constitutional theory of necessity, Lincoln forcibly coerced states back into the Union, suspended habeas corpus, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation to shatter and remake the Constitution into a "new covenant" of freedom worthy of "veneration and moral aspiration."
Feldman provides an accessible and engaging reinterpretation of one of the country's most esteemed documents and one of its most significant presidents. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver, Colo.