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This volume explores the relationship between the Civil War and cities in the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy. Separate essays use the lens of the city to re-examine main themes of the Civil War era, such as the broad scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and the new urban South created in the wake of the war's destruction. All of these topics have been the subject of a more general renaissance in Civil War studies that has bridged earlier thematic divides between military, political, and social history. Along with a more integrative approach to Civil War history, recent work by historians of the 19th-century South has dramatically revised our understanding of slavery's relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. As late as the 1980s conventional scholarly wisdom regarded slavery as a retrograde institution that hindered economic development while encouraging a paternalistic, anti-modern politics and culture that among other things inhibited the growth of cities. As this earlier perspective has come under a wide-ranging critique cities have increasingly seemed like important places to study the Civil War-era South, rather than anomalous exceptions to a supposed agrarian norm. This volume adds to that the current intellectual movement by showcasing the findings of recent studies that integrate southern cities into the history of the Civil War and debating the merits of this new understanding of slavery, the South, and its cities.

Americans take for granted that government does not have the right to permanently seize private property without just compensation. Yet for much of American history, such a view constituted the weaker side of an ongoing argument about government sovereignty and individual rights. What brought about this drastic shift in legal and political thought? This book locates that change in the crucible of the Civil War. In the early days of the war, Congress passed the First and Second Confiscation Acts, authorizing the Union to seize private property in the rebellious states of the Confederacy, and the Confederate Congress responded with the broader Sequestration Act. The competing acts fueled a fierce, sustained debate among legislators and lawyers about the principles underlying alternative ideas of private property and state power, one that by 1870 was increasingly dominated by today's view of more limited government power.

This book leads the reader to understand exactly how Abraham Lincoln faced the inevitable constitutional issues brought on by the Civil War. Examining what arguments he made in defense of his actions and how his words and deeds fit into the context of the times, it illuminates Lincoln's actions by placing them squarely within their historical moment. The answers here are crucial not only for a better understanding of the Civil War but also for shedding light on issues—state sovereignty, presidential power, and limitations on civil liberties in the name of national security—that continue to test the limits of constitutional law even today.