| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Farber. Lincoln's Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. 240. $27.50.
When I teach constitutional history, I tell my class in the first lecture that it will be a course in constitutional history and not constitutional law. After that, several students, heading for law school, drop the class. This book by David Farber is essentially about constitutional law, so at this point some historians may want to drop out of reading this review, for they will not find in the book a richly contextualized study of constitutional conflict in the Civil War era. Nor will they read about the social and political groups of the nineteenth century that fronted their causes behind particular constitutional arguments. Still, there is much to be learned from this study. Farber offers an extremely clearly written analysis of constitutional arguments about issues that arose before and during the Civil War (unfortunately, he chose to leave Reconstruction questions out of the book). These are not all arguments used at the time, and it is one of the interesting contributions of the book that it traces some of the issues in later U.S. Supreme Court decisions.	1
A little over half of the book discusses secession; the remainder deals with presidential power in wartime. Farber gives the secessionists a fair hearing, but he does not see them as winning the constitutional argument. Abraham Lincoln and presidential power in wartime itself are likewise given searching analysis, and, with a few exceptions, constitutional vindication.	. . .

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