Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy [Hardcover]

George P. Fletcher (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195141423 | ISBN-13: 978-0195141429 | Publication Date: May 17, 2001 | Edition: 1ST

In this perspective-altering new book, George P. Fletcher asserts that the Civil War was the most significant event in American legal history, an event that not only abolished slavery and changed the laws of the land but also created a new set of principles that continues to guide our thinking today.
Much as historians and lawmakers strive to maintain a continuity with the Constitution of 1787, Fletcher shows that the Civil War presented a rupture not only between North and South but between two visions of the United States. The first Constitution was based on the principles of peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republican elitism. The government chosen by "We the People" sought, above all, to protect the rights of individuals and to limit the leadership of the nation to a select few. It was a Constitution, moreover, that accommodated the most undemocratic institution imaginable: slavery. The second Constitution, forged on the killing fields of Vicksburg and Antietam, articulated in Lincoln's visionary Gettysburg Address, and enacted in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, reinvented the United States according to the principles of organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy. Fletcher shows how these higher principles, though suppressed for decades, shape our sensibilities today in our efforts to expand the range of those protected as equal under the law, to promote equality in the workplace, to safeguard the interests of those who are at a competitive disadvantage, to rethink the limits of free speech and of religious liberty, and to amend the Constitution in the spirit of popular democracy.
Written with passion, clarity, and sweeping historical knowledge, Our Secret Constitution will fundamentally change the way we view our past and bring new clarity to the issues we confront today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Garry Wills and others have described the Gettysburg Address as a redefinition of American democracy. Fletcher (With Justice for Some) argues that this unprecedented document, along with the three Reconstruction amendments (i.e., the 13th, 14th and 15th ) to the Constitution, form the core of a "second Constitution," based on "organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy... principles radically opposed" to those of the first Constitution, which promulgated "peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republican ‚litism." Despite a superficial crudity in this abstract opposition, Fletcher the Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia develops a powerful case for this second Constitution, born from the need for redemption under law for the nation's crime of slavery and blood spilled in civil war. Drawing parallels to France's Napoleonic Code civil in the aftermath of the Terror and to Germany's Basic Law following WWII and the Holocaust, Fletcher argues most persuasively that this second constitution is rooted in the idea of a religiously based higher law grounded in historical necessity. His argument that the second Constitution was driven underground, only to gradually reemerge, makes sense in terms of Supreme Court rulings and constitutional amendments cited, but slights substantial historical conflicts. Yet this hardly matters for his purpose in developing a novel perspective to expand our constitutional horizons and identify fundamental wrong turns such as the post-13th Amendment focus on supervising and correcting state governments, rather than directly ensuring equal protection and democratic rights, or the failure to use "all men are created equal" as a guiding maxim of constitutional interpretation. With subtlety and coherence, Fletcher presents a lively critique of constitutional law. Agent, Angela Miller.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

By carefully analyzing the words and deeds of Abraham Lincoln, Fletcher (law, Columbia Univ.) successfully portrays the birth of a new constitutional order that emerged from the blood and bullets of the Civil War. This new spirit of cohesion reflected Lincoln's zest for bringing together the interrelated elements of a political entity toward the goal of a common good and a higher order. The values of nationhood, equality, and democracy complement and support one another, and the Gettysburg Address brings these concepts together in a way that crystallizes the proposed new scheme of things. Juxtaposing themes also common to the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as two Inaugural Addresses, and an element of spirituality intrinsic to the Declaration of Independence, the author chronicles the ups and downs of Lincoln's attempt to establish a cornerstone for progress for the post-Civil War era. Fletcher probes the extent to which the universal principles so revered by Lincoln and so inherent in the 13th and 14th Amendments would emerge in the coming years and would indeed influence the outcome of struggles between the banal interests of state legislatures and the notion of a legal order of a higher magnitude, akin to the English common law, in shaping the nature of citizenship, the rights of minorities and women, and, most recently, the rights of voters to select a president. Fairly easy for general audiences to read, this book is recommended for public and academic libraries. Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Law Lib., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1ST edition (May 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195141423
• ISBN-13: 978-0195141429
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,960,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Constitution, April 18, 2001

By 

Steve Sheppard (Fayetteville, AR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (Hardcover)

American worship our constitution, and like many devotees, we'd rather have faith that we know the object of our devotion than explore the truth of our knowledge. So, many believe that the U.S. Constitution is a coherent idea, somehow preserved as first coined and ensuring freedom, equality, and justice.

In George Fletcher's newest book, he tells the history of our constitution and demonstrates the importance of the U.S. Civil War, and particularly Lincoln's war rhetoric, in transforming both the constitution and the country. Its most compelling effect, Fletcher argues, was to transform the fundamental role of government from primarily securing freedom of the citizen to also promoting fairness and equality among citizens. The echoes of this transformation in the constitutional structures of the United States can be heard to this day in our arguments over religious tolerance, free speech, abortion, even the recent elections.

There is much to contend with in this book, which in the spirit of full disclosure, this reviewer read in draft form. Some will find Fletcher's definition of "constitution" to be too broad. Some will find his notion of equality as a cardinal American virtue to be unworkable or improper, regardless of its historical pedigree. Some will disagree with Fletcher's historiography. None will be able fairly to reject his arguments without conceding their significance.

Building, and in many cases greatly extending, the work of historians such as Eric Foner and constitutional scholars such as Bruce Ackerman, Fletcher, a Columbia Law Professor, has written a compelling and controversial argument.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking theory marred by poor history, May 29, 2003

By 

R. Price "caesar_42" (Liverpool, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (Hardcover)

George Fletcher presents an interesting thesis, that we have two constitutions. One created in 1787 the other in 1865. The new constitutional order was found to represent the principles of equality, nationalism, and democracy which Fletcher argues was best expressed in the Gettysburg address.

Now Fletcher makes a number of interesting points in his analysis. For example, he provides a wonderful explanation for Lincoln's extraconstitutional use of power during the Civil War; that his commitment to nationalism lead him to reject constitutional limitations when they didn't allow him to perserve the nation. Also Fletcher provides a brief discussion of the logical inconsistencies in the 10th amendment, that states created after 1787 couldn't delegate power to a federal government that essentially created them.

But the good points are overwhelmed by Fletcher's tendency towards historical simplicity. He seems to believe that the principles of his 2nd constitution sprung forth only as a result of the Civil War. But the principles of equaltiy, nationalism, and democracy existed since the begining of the republic. While these principles didn't dominate they were present and growing during the antebellum period. Particularly the principle of democracy spread rapidly during the period, this is evidenced by the fact that all white males had the right to vote by the 1820s and they voted for practically all state officials including judges. While its true that this isn't our idea of democracy and equaltiy but it is evidence of a developing trend that probably would have continued without the war. Also he ignores the instances where postbellum democratic trends were inequalitarian in nature, such as in Wyoming were women were given the right to vote in hopes that whites would be able to overpower immigrating blacks into the state.

While this is an interesting book and provokes thought and consideration it shouldn't be taken as the last word. The best aspect being that it gets people to consider the fact that the constitution is more than what is written on paper.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberty, Fraternity and... Equality?, December 11, 2001

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (Hardcover)

The author asks us to put aside our conventional assumptions and confront a 'subtle and unusual argument', that the Civil War called forth a new Constitutional order, in the Reconstruction Amendments. This new order is so radically different from that established in the original Constitution of 1787 that it amounts to a new Constitution altogether, a second American republic, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The book becomes then a fascinating discourse on Lincoln's Gettysburg address, in the incremental transformation created by the war from preserving the Union to abolishing slavery. The outcome is the passage from disguised elitism to the real birth of popular democracy in the redemptive experience of confronting the contradictions latent in the birth of the American nation.
"...we resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain..."