Front cover image for Act of justice : Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the law of war

Act of justice : Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the law of war

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln declared that as president he would "have no lawful right" to interfere with the institution of slavery. Yet less than two years later, he issued a proclamation intended to free all slaves throughout the Confederate states. When critics challenged the constitutional soundness of the act, Lincoln asserted that he was endowed "with the law of war in time of war." This book contends Lincoln was no reluctant emancipator; he wrote a truly radical document that treated Confederate slaves as an oppressed people rather than merely as enemy property. In this respect, Lincoln's proclamation anticipated the intellectual warfare tactics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. -- Publisher
eBook, English, 2007
University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2007
Electronic books
1 online resource (202 pages)
9780813172736, 9780813138213, 9780813134871, 9786613233219, 9781283233217, 081317273X, 0813138213, 0813134870, 6613233218, 1283233215
173766019
Planting the Seed: Charles Sumner and John Quincy Adams
The Supreme Court on Private Property and War
Criminal Conspiracy or War?
The Union Applies the Law of War
The Law as a Weapon
Congress Acts and the Confederacy Responds
Military Necessity and Lincoln's Concept of the War
The Proclamation as a Weapon of War
The Conkling Letter
A Radical Recognition of Freedom
Appendixes: First Confiscation Act, August 6, 1861 ; Browning-Lincoln correspondence, September 1861 ; Second Confiscation Act, July 17, 1862 ; Emancipation Proclamation, first draft, July 22, 1862 ; Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862 ; Final Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010
English