Feldman’s reliance on Jefferson Davis to frame a book on Abraham Lincoln thus makes perfect sense: Aside from the slaveholders’ insistence on the ethical legitimacy of slavery, Feldman’s constitutional analysis consistently backs their arguments over Lincoln’s. Less than perfect, unfortunately, are the renderings of American history he offers to support his surprising thesis ... Feldman’s depiction of the Constitution’s connection to slavery is questionable ... Feldman ignores the antislavery currents inside the Federal Convention that challenged and sometimes defeated the pro-slavery delegates. He overlooks how much the Constitution’s provision authorizing abolition of U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade was an antislavery victory over the lower South, which tried to block it as a dealbreaker — a measure that, even when weakened by a maneuver Madison bemoaned, was the first serious blow ever against the trade undertaken in the name of a national government. Feldman fails to see the Constitution as an ambiguous document that offered protections to the slaveholders but also contained considerable antislavery potential, sufficient for thoughtful if wishful Northern abolitionists like Benjamin Rush to hail it as the death knell of slavery ... Coming at a time when not a few scholars have been saying that our modern Constitution is broken, Feldman’s final paradox — that it took an elected tyrant to emancipate the enslaved and usher in a rebirth of American freedom — can sound ominous. Still, there should be no cause for alarm. The Broken Constitution displays its author’s usual brilliance and boldness in his contrarianism, and a passionate engagement with the past. What it lacks is historical soundness. In the end, Jefferson Davis’s constitutionalism proves, once again, no match for Abraham Lincoln’s.
Vignettes about slavery, the negotiators of the compromises, abolitionists, the Civil War, and beyond offer context for Feldman’s innovative legal analysis. In describing interactions among political groups, voting rights, diverse views of abolitionists, suspending habeas corpus, and censorship, Feldman offers insights strikingly relevant to today’s politics.
While Feldman’s book...has many valuable insights, its argument downplays some crucial context. Feldman indicts Lincoln for his wartime suspension of civil liberties but has little to say about the abuses of power that provoked the constitutional crisis: Southern enslavers’ prolonged suppression of free speech or their radical defiance of Lincoln’s lawful election ... Feldman deftly contrasts President James Buchanan’s position that the federal government was powerless to make war on the states with Lincoln’s conviction that the president had the constitutional duty to suppress a rebellion ... In places The Broken Constitution reads like an arraignment of Lincoln, accusing him of illogical, incoherent, paranoid thinking and of 'subverting' the Constitution ... Feldman’s thought-provoking case for a stark rupture in Union war aims will surely occasion lively debate. But his astute argument would have been better served by a less-polemical tone.
The Broken Constitution reflects [Feldman's] formidable gifts. His account of the legal controversy surrounding Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus is masterly. It exemplifies Mr. Feldman’s talent for explaining complex legal matters elegantly and conveying what is important without condescending to the general reader ... The Broken Constitution is more than an account of the Civil War as a constitutional crisis. It is also, as Mr. Feldman writes, 'a portrait of Lincoln as a constitutional thinker.' And here the book suffers from a serious weakness—namely, an unwillingness to take the president’s own understanding of the Constitution seriously ... The compromise with slavery, on this account, is the defining feature of the original Constitution. This view comes across as a crude simplification ... His narrative improves markedly as he describes the constitutional questions that Lincoln confronted in waging the war. In riveting detail, he shows how Lincoln assumed powers almost indistinguishable from those of a military dictator ... Mr. Feldman shows an admirable regard for a vital constitutional principle but little awareness of the chaos and carnage Lincoln confronted ... To dismiss those earlier aspirations as a mere tolerance for slavery flattens our formative national tragedy into a moral melodrama. Slavery contradicted the foundational ideal of the American republic. But re-establishing free government by military conquest entailed a new contradiction, one that Mr. Feldman doesn’t see and Lincoln couldn’t avoid.
... one must be forewarned that much of the text is law or legal-oriented, such that one must, at times, read carefully in order to understand the point that is being made ... not all that Lincoln did has necessarily redounded to the benefit of or progress toward a 'more perfect union,' notwithstanding our veneration of him as virtually our greatest president. The reader should ultimately keep this in mind, whatever one’s opinion of our 16th president. Needless to say, one must read Feldman’s otherwise well written and researched account with a grain of salt and consider whether the benefits or advantages outweigh the damage done in terms of our society, and government, in the last 155 years.
Feldman offers an elucidating look into Lincoln’s incremental thinking, neatly demonstrating how he articulated the 'before' and 'after' Constitution in the Gettysburg Address as a compromise versus a moral document, using an Old Testament/New Testament analogy that embodied equality for all promised in the Declaration of Independence. Feldman never bogs down in legalese, rendering a scholarly topic accessible for general readers. A marvelously intricate work on Lincoln’s writings and thoughts, which continue to offer fodder for historians.
... probing ... Though the wealth of detail on Lincoln’s life and travels bogs down the narrative somewhat, this is an astute and eye-opening look at an underexamined aspect of the quest to end slavery.
