By George P. Fletcher

During this perspective-altering new ebook, George P. Fletcher asserts that the Civil battle was once the main major occasion in American legal heritage, an occasion that not just abolished slavery and adjusted the legislation of the land but additionally created a brand new set of ideas that maintains to steer our considering at the present time.

a lot as historians and lawmakers attempt to keep up a continuity with the structure of 1787, Fletcher indicates that the Civil warfare offered a rupture not just among North and South yet among visions of the us. the 1st structure used to be in keeping with the rules of peoplehood as a voluntary organization, person freedom, and republican elitism. the govt. selected by way of "We the People" sought, specifically, to guard the rights of people and to restrict the management of the country to a opt for few. It was once a structure, in addition, that accommodated the main undemocratic establishment that you can imagine: slavery. the second one structure, cast at the killing fields of Vicksburg and Antietam, articulated in Lincoln's visionary Gettysburg tackle, and enacted within the 13th, Fourteenth, and 15th Amendments, reinvented the U.S. in response to the rules of natural nationhood, equality of all individuals, and well known democracy. Fletcher indicates how those larger rules, although suppressed for many years, form our sensibilities this day in our efforts to extend the diversity of these safe as equivalent less than the legislations, to advertise equality within the office, to defend the pursuits of these who're at a aggressive drawback, to reconsider the bounds of loose speech and of non secular liberty, and to amend the structure within the spirit of renowned democracy.

Written with ardour, readability, and sweeping ancient wisdom, Our mystery Constitution will essentially swap the best way we view our prior and produce new readability to the problems we confront this day.