J.R. Graham has written an excellent book giving history and legal perspectives. Other reviews have made excellent observations of the content.
One reviewer erroneously commented that the book was factually flawed in that the Constitution prohibits secession. That is, of course, untrue. The section he refers to has to do with the admission of new states and a new state cannot be formed of other states without the consent of Congress. It doesn't take a book to understand the legitimacy of secession. After all, that's what the Declaration of Independence was about. If one rejects secession, one must also reject the Declaration of Independence.
The most serious flaw in the book regarded race and citizenship - a topic not really the focus of the book anyway. The author cites a judges opinion that non-whites that were free were citizens and the author generalizes this to all states. In fact, only a few states recognized non-whites as citizens. And because all privileges of citizenship had to be recognized throughout the United States, these non-white citizens could not properly be called US citizens until a new class of citizenship was created by the 14th Amendment. The author imagines that citizenship existed without voting rights (after all, white women could not vote either.) However, voting was always something required to indicate membership in the "sovereignty" and it could be established with certain qualifications - age, sex, etc. But could you imagine the possibility of prohibiting all whites from participating in government? It is clear that voting has a great bearing on the concept of citizenship.
It is abundantly clear from most state constitutions, numerous naturalization acts and court rulings that race formed an essential element of who "the people" were that formed the United States. The point is not "racism" but simply what historically a "nation" was thought to be. Even Webster's 1828 dictionary pointed out that "posterity" had to do with a "race" of decendents.
My point here is to just be clear that Dred Scott was not some exceptionally bad ruling but was actually indicitive of the overwhelming majority of thought. That to create a pluralistic, multi-nationalistic, global community of the former United States requires dealing with the past Christian history that considered race important. One way to do that is to sweep it under the rug as this author has done. But I am of the old school of dealing truthfully with the past.
The other flaw was the author's failure to recognize the full scope of the 14th Amendment's harm to America. By creating a new subject-class citizenship called a US citizen which allows even corporations to now be called US citizens, it has forever confused the original nature of state citizenship. This is well documented in court cases and even declared to be "well settled" in many others. The Utah Supreme Court wrote an excellent treatise on the 14th Amendment, exposing it's flaws in text and how it was illegally ratified.
In spite of the flaws on these off-point topics, I highly recommend this book. Unfortunately his commentary on the 14th Amendment and on citizenship does undermine his scholarship a bit.
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