| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. viii, 231 pp. $39.00, ISBN 978–0–226–31482–2.)
Daniel W. Hamilton, an assistant professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, presents an insightful analysis of U.S. and Confederate confiscation legislation during the Civil War. He points out the immense difference between the issues the laws raised. The Confederacy was confiscating the property of enemy aliens, a relatively simple proposition under international laws of war. But because northerners maintained that southerners remained U.S. citizens, the U.S. Confiscation Acts raised profound questions about property rights and due process of law.	1
Hamilton finds that U.S. congressmen divided into "radical" and "conservative" camps on these questions, with a large, floating group of "moderates" that eventually dictated the outcome. He links the divisions to rival conceptions of property. The "radicals" took a traditional "republican" view: property rights were contingent on the general welfare. Reinforcing that conception was a long tradition linking property to loyalty. This view ran up against the "liberal" notion that individuals had an inherent, natural right to property. The "conservatives" took the "liberal" view that one could be deprived of property only for due cause adjudicated in a court of law. This stricture even applied to property in slaves.	. . .

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