The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil WarAmericans 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? Daniel W. Hamilton 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, a debate which by 1870 was increasingly dominated by today’s view of more limited government power. Through its exploration of this little-studied consequence of the debates over confiscation during the Civil War, The Limits of Sovereignty will be essential to an understanding of the place of private property in American law and legal history. |
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... legislature was not, of course, a debating society but a fo- rum for making law. In considering confiscation, legislators were thrown back upon first principles, forced to articulate their vision of property rights and the limits of ...
... legislature alone as during the Revolution. Confiscation instead could be legitimately enforced only in the courts, one case at a time. For these lawmakers, trained in the treatises of Joseph Story and James Kent, and most importantly ...
... legislature could legitimately seize enemy property or whether confiscation must be the province of the courts, proceeding one case at a time. Finally, we must draw a line between legislative and military confisca- tion. There is an ...
... legislatures, on the other hand, to confiscate individual property without compensa- tion was a much less settled, more fundamentally contested area of the law and of constitutional interpretation. CHAPTER ONE Legislative Property ...
... legislatures. During the Revolution, private prop- erty had been permanently seized by state legislatures without ... legislature passed two separate confiscation bills, in 1778 and 1782, naming over three hundred persons guilty of ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
Radical Property Confiscation in the ThirtySeventh Congress | 20 |
The Conservative Assault on Confiscation | 41 |
The Moderate Coup | 57 |
The Confederate Sequestration Act | 82 |
The Ordeal of Sequestration | 111 |
Civil War Confiscation in the Reconstruction Supreme Court | 140 |
The Limits of Sovereignty | 169 |
Notes | 173 |
Index | 217 |
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The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the ... Daniel W. Hamilton No preview available - 2007 |