Peter Radan

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders' Union (eBook, ePUB)

Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the unilateral secession of a state from the Union was unconstitutional because the Constitution created an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States. The Court ruled there was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States. In his iconoclastic work, Peter Radan demonstrates why the Court's ruling was wrong and why, on the basis of American constitutional law in 18601861, the unilateral secessions of the Confederate states were lawful on the grounds that the United States was forged as a slaveholders' Union.

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders' Union addresses two constitutional issues: first, whether the states in 1860 had a right to secede from the Union and second, what significance slavery had in defining the constitutional Union. These two matters came together when the states seceded on the grounds that the system of government they had agreed tonamely, a system of human enslavementhad been violated by the incoming Republican administration. The legitimacy of this secession was anchored, as Radan demonstrates, in the compact theory of the Constitution, which held that because the Constitution was a compact between the member states of the Union, breaches of its fundamental provisions gave affected states the right to unilaterally secede from the Union. In so doing the Confederate states sought to preserve and protect their peculiar institution by forming a more perfect slaveholders' Union.

Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders' Union stands as the first and only systematic analysis of the legal arguments mounted for and against secession in 18601861 and reshapes how we understand the Civil War and, consequently, the history of the United States more generally.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University Press of Kansas
• Seitenzahl: 448
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Februar 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780700635825
• Artikelnr.: 75674440

Autorenporträt

Peter Radan is honorary professor of law at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. He is the author of The Break-up of Yugoslavia and International Law and coauthor of Creating New States: Theory and Practice of Secession.