Burrus M. Carnahan, Act of Justice, 1st Ed., Signed

Description

Burruss M. Carnahan wrote Act of Justice to examine Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure.

When critics challenged the constitutional soundness of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln pointed to the international laws and usages of war as the legal basis for his proclamation, asserting that the Constitution invested the president “with the law of war in time of war.” It was unclear whether state and federal courts would agree. Through careful analysis Burrus M. Carnahan concludes that if the courts had decided that the proclamation was not justified, the result would have been the personal legal liability of thousands of Union officers to aggrieved slave owners. This argument offers further support to the notion that Lincoln’s delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation was an exercise of political prudence, not a personal reluctance to free the slaves; he wrote a truly radical document that treated them as an oppressed people rather than merely as enemy property.

“No other great presidential document has been so ignorantly maligned as Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The more we learn, through Carnahan, of the nineteenth century’s ‘laws of war’ and Lincoln’s radical prudence in interpreting them, the greater Lincoln stands as a presidential commander-in-chief and an emancipator.” — Allen C. Guelzo.

Lightly sunned; else very good. Signed.

Carnahan, Burrus M. ACT OF JUSTICE: LINCOLN’S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION AND THE LAW OF WAR. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007. 1st edition, 202p.