A new Lincoln book, The Broken Constitution

[Gene C]

Evidently my opportunity to read a NY Times article is limited because I don't know how to gain access to them since I am not a subscriber.
Before I was denied access, I did manage to read that if you purchase the book that is being reviewed, they get a commission.

Fido reminded me of a well known canine proverb, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you"

[Rob Wick]

Interesting David that you leave out the comment about impugning the character and reputation of Lincoln. That's all a person needs to read to determine your point of view.

I have to admit to confusion as to your second point. I said Wilentz's critique was worthwhile. I agree with his point that the book lacks historical soundness. Only you could extrapolate that I am somehow opposed to historical soundness.

Gene, I have a subscription to the Times. When I get home I can post it here.

Best
Rob

[Gene C]

You two remind me of this scene from Monte Python

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmJmxD0ulUM

[David Lockmiller]

(11-15-2021 01:32 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Interesting David that you leave out the comment about impugning the character and reputation of Lincoln. That's all a person needs to read to determine your point of view.


Best
Rob

At your request (from my initial post on this thread):

Constitutional Law Professor Feldman of Harvard University and author of a new Lincoln book, The Broken Constitution, made the argument on November 8 on the Amanpour & Company show, that President Lincoln created his own U. S. Constitution on several occasions. His specious argument is meant to sell books by impugning the character and reputation of President Lincoln in quite similar manner to that of Nikole Hannah-Jones. The interviewer lacked superior Lincoln knowledge, only referencing Lincoln material from the book, and thereby, was unquestioning of the many false and distorted “Lincoln” facts made by Professor Feldman in his lengthy argument to this effect.

[Rob Wick]

Gene,

Here is Wilentz's review.

Best
Rob

Over the course of two days in February 1850, amid the debates in the U.S. Senate that would lead to the famous congressional compromise over slavery later that year, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi delivered a florid floor speech that lamented the impending ruin of the nation. (Exactly 11 years later, Davis would take office as the president of the Confederate States of America.) A flood of antislavery fanaticism and sectional hatred, Davis declaimed, had opened a “moral crevasse” that endangered America’s very foundations. The framers, Davis pronounced, had enshrined in the Constitution the right to hold property in humans, but frenzied antislavery Northerners undermined the law of the land; and now the flood was surging, pouring “turgid waters through the broken Constitution.”

Davis’s pro-slavery remarks provide Noah Feldman with both the epigraph and the title of his new book about Jefferson Davis’s nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, which seems a very odd choice. Unlike Davis, Lincoln never believed that the Constitution had been broken, even after the slaveholders began their rebellion in 1860-61. Instead, Lincoln charged that the insurrection Davis helped to lead was “the essence of anarchy.”

On both points, though, Feldman contends that Davis was right and Lincoln was wrong. Moreover, Feldman argues, despite Lincoln’s professed fidelity to the framers’ work, he was the one who finally broke the Constitution during the Civil War by turning the presidency into a quasi dictatorship, much as his Confederate and Copperhead enemies alleged he did. Only then, Feldman concludes, paradoxically, could America redeem its claims to nobility by purging the original sin of slavery, refounding itself by embracing what he calls a new, expansive “moral Constitution.”

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.

A professor at Harvard Law School and a prolific scholar and commentator on current affairs, Feldman is well equipped to assess Lincoln’s constitutional record. A lucid, provocative stylist and an expert in fields ranging from Islamic politics to the American separation of church and state, he is widely known for an illuminating political biography of James Madison. “The Broken Constitution” can be read as a sequel to that book, connecting the nation’s founding and early years to what Lincoln called the “astounding” outcome of the Civil War. Indeed, Feldman roots his interpretation of Lincoln and slavery in what he now calls the “compromise Constitution” that Madison and the other framers hammered out — the Constitution, he says, that Lincoln would eventually break.

From the start, however, Feldman’s depiction of the Constitution’s connection to slavery is questionable. Although he calls it the “compromise Constitution,” Feldman’s Constitution was almost seamlessly pro-slavery. The famous negotiations that offered concessions to the slaveholders come across more like abject submission. 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.

Having erased the Constitution’s ambiguities over slavery, Feldman claims antislavery activists down to Lincoln could not seriously invoke the Constitution in order to attack slavery “because the Constitution said nothing against the practice.” With little more to go on than the wispy, hypocritical egalitarian phrases in the Declaration of Independence — dismissed by Feldman as “the slaveholders’ Declaration” — antislavery advocates supposedly railed against slavery with admirable moral fervor but feeble constitutional backing. When Lincoln carefully constructed a historical and constitutional argument for halting slavery’s expansion and hastening its doom for his famous Cooper Institute address in 1860, the result, Feldman contends, was an “odd performance” that incoherently identified antislavery possibilities in the framers’ “compromise Constitution.” Eradicating slavery, Feldman insists, would require breaking the very Constitution that Lincoln claimed to venerate.

In fact, as historians have been detailing for decades, antislavery spokesmen and organizations, from the framer Benjamin Franklin in 1790 up to and including Lincoln’s Republican Party, repeatedly seized upon provisions in the Constitution, from the preamble’s “general welfare” clause to the provision granting Congress authority over the national territories, as instruments to hasten slavery’s demise. Three generations of antislavery constitutionalists, while admitting that the Constitution barred Congress from directly abolishing slavery in the states where it already existed, pushed numerous strategies to place slavery, as Lincoln would put it, “in course of ultimate extinction.” The antislavery constitutionalists’ demands — above all to halt slavery’s expansion, bar the admission of new slaveholding states and uphold state laws that would obstruct the capture and return of fugitive slaves — in time persuaded no less stalwart an abolitionist than Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was a “glorious liberty document.” As incorporated in the Republican Party platform, those demands led directly to Lincoln’s ascension in 1860, Southern secession and the civil war that ended in slavery’s abolition.

Contrary to Jefferson Davis, Lincoln and the Republicans’ triumph did not break the Constitution; it broke the pro-slavery view of the Constitution while vindicating the long beleaguered antislavery view. Nor did Lincoln break an already broken Constitution by assuming quasi-dictatorial powers in order to preserve the Union. Feldman’s charge that Lincoln violated respect for constitutional popular sovereignty by refusing to acquiesce in Southern secession elides that the Constitution established the majority as sovereign in national affairs, and it rests on the assumption, rightly disputed by Lincoln, that the Southern fire-eaters truly represented the will of the Southern citizenry. Even President James Buchanan stated that secession was unconstitutional. Feldman’s criticisms of Lincoln for trivializing and then suspending habeas corpus in much of the North have more merit. Still, it strains credulity to indict Lincoln for tyranny because he took emergency actions, almost exclusively against Confederates, spies and other traitors, in order to save democratic government, all the while holding open elections and suffering the merciless attacks of Democrats.

Finally, Feldman cuts corners to claim that the Emancipation Proclamation was an arbitrary violation of slaveholders’ property rights. In reality, Lincoln wrote the proclamation armed with abundant legal opinion, including a well-known pronouncement of John Quincy Adams affirming the president’s authority to emancipate the enslaved when invasion or insurrection threatened the nation. As an antislavery constitutionalist, meanwhile, Lincoln never conceded an absolute right to property in humans.

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.

[RJNorton]

(11-15-2021 10:05 AM)Gene C Wrote:  Evidently my opportunity to read a NY Times article is limited because I don't know how to gain access to them since I am not a subscriber.
Before I was denied access, I did manage to read that if you purchase the book that is being reviewed, they get a commission.

Fido reminded me of a well known canine proverb, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you"

Gene, what I am about to describe may not work every time, but it often works for me in situations like this. Here goes: when I click on the link Rob provided I get the same message you received and cannot read the article. However, if I go to that page via Google, I can read it. Try typing the words 'broken constitution' into Google's search box and find the link to the New York Times article on the first page of Google's listings. Click on the Google link and see if that method allows you to read what was previously denied. I find this method often works not only for New York Times' articles but many other newspapers as well.

[Gene C]

Thank you Rob and Roger

[David Lockmiller]

In the New York Times today, the following was one of the "9 New Books We (the New York Times) Recommend This Week." The recommendation reads in its entirety:

THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Noah Feldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Abraham Lincoln, Feldman contends, embraced a new, “moral Constitution” by purging the country’s original sin of slavery and re-establishing the nation on a more noble foundation. A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman is “a lucid, provocative stylist” as well as “a prolific scholar and commentator on current affairs … well equipped to assess Lincoln’s constitutional record,” Sean Wilentz writes in his review. “‘The Broken Constitution’ displays its author’s usual brilliance and boldness in his contrarianism, and a passionate engagement with the past.”

What the NYTimes recommendation today left out was the very next sentence that Sean Wilentz actually wrote in his New York Times book review regarding Professor Feldman's book: "What it lacks is historical soundness."

I wonder if that was a purposeful mistake.

[Gene C]

I don't think it was a mistake at all.

[Rob Wick]

Quote:What the NYTimes recommendation today left out was the very next sentence that Sean Wilentz actually wrote in his New York Times book review regarding Professor Feldman's book: "What it lacks is historical soundness."

I wonder if that was a purposeful mistake.

Quote:I don't think it was a mistake at all.

So what? The title of the book contains a hyperlink to Wilentz's entire review that someone could read if they are interested. You guys seem to think there is some grand conspiracy here spearheaded by the Times to somehow change the way America looks at and studies history (and Gene, with all due respect, when you provide a link from Fox that is a sure way to show what point you want to make).

What you need to understand is the purpose of a review, at least in a popular outlet. It's a marketing tool first and foremost to sell books. Look at how many books are published and what books are selected by any outlet to be reviewed. Very few newspapers today even offer book reviews, let alone a whole section. Tarbell's books were reviewed in dozens of newspapers throughout the US, including the major outlets as well as some small publications that don't even exist today. To be sure, many of the small papers published syndicated reviews, but the point is they provided valuable space for it, all for the purpose of selling the book to their readers.

The nine books selected (and clearly marked as "editor's choice") are books that the newspaper is offering to its readers as a suggestion. Wilentz, or any reviewer for that matter, has no control over what part of his/her review that is featured or used in a quote. I've never seen a contract that the NYT uses for its reviewers, but I wouldn't be surprised that there is a clause outlining that very point. Wilentz had his say in the published review. If Wilentz feels that somehow his quote was taken out of context, or used inappropriately, he is free to write the editors either publicly or privately and complain, or to refuse any further commissions by the paper. I doubt he will, because he is seasoned enough to know the score.

Sorry gentlemen, but there is neither smoke nor fire here.

Best
Rob

[David Lockmiller]

(11-21-2021 07:18 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  

Quote:What the NYTimes recommendation today left out was the very next sentence that Sean Wilentz actually wrote in his New York Times book review regarding Professor Feldman's book: "What it lacks is historical soundness."

I wonder if that was a purposeful mistake.

Quote:I don't think it was a mistake at all.

So what? The title of the book contains a hyperlink to Wilentz's entire review that someone could read if they are interested. You guys seem to think there is some grand conspiracy here spearheaded by the Times to somehow change the way America looks at and studies history (and Gene, with all due respect, when you provide a link from Fox that is a sure way to show what point you want to make).

What you need to understand is the purpose of a review, at least in a popular outlet. It's a marketing tool first and foremost to sell books. Look at how many books are published and what books are selected by any outlet to be reviewed. Very few newspapers today even offer book reviews, let alone a whole section. Tarbell's books were reviewed in dozens of newspapers throughout the US, including the major outlets as well as some small publications that don't even exist today. To be sure, many of the small papers published syndicated reviews, but the point is they provided valuable space for it, all for the purpose of selling the book to their readers.

The nine books selected (and clearly marked as "editor's choice") are books that the newspaper is offering to its readers as a suggestion. Wilentz, or any reviewer for that matter, has no control over what part of his/her review that is featured or used in a quote. I've never seen a contract that the NYT uses for its reviewers, but I wouldn't be surprised that there is a clause outlining that very point. Wilentz had his say in the published review. If Wilentz feels that somehow his quote was taken out of context, or used inappropriately, he is free to write the editors either publicly or privately and complain, or to refuse any further commissions by the paper. I doubt he will, because he is seasoned enough to know the score.

Sorry gentlemen, but there is neither smoke nor fire here.

Best
Rob

Rob, I don't think that you are sorry.

The point is that the New York Times is supposedly providing an unbiased opinion as to whether or not its readers should purchase the book.

I think that there is both smoke and fire here.

David

[Rob Wick]

Ah David, you're right. I'm not the least bit sorry for my opinion. I am, however, sorry that you don't seem to understand simple fact. What Sean Wilentz wrote, and the Times published, was a book review. What the Times' editors printed yesterday was not a review, but rather an opinion of the newspaper as to what it believes to be the best nine books for its readers. It is not a review.

As to your belief that a review is supposed to be this sacrosanct "unbiased" article, I can only shake my head. A review is an opinion by a writer who has a background on a topic. In developing that background one usually has developed bias and points of view. That's what makes a review worthwhile. Bias is saying that only people who wear blue shoes are qualified to write reviews. Kind of like saying that only people who praise Lincoln are qualified to write about him.

Best
Rob

[Gene C]

(11-22-2021 09:14 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Bias is saying that only people who wear blue shoes are qualified to write reviews. Kind of like saying that only people who praise Lincoln are qualified to write about him.

Best
Rob

I couldn't let that statement go without making the comment "That reminds me of a song"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvsYRAc-BWA

So if you want to become a qualified Lincoln writer, it's not as hard or expensive as one might think, and just in time for Christmas
https://www.lightinthebox.com/en/p/men-s...7e1061e707

And since it's Monday, and a bit slow on the forum, here's something a little extra for all you music lovers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDLtjJKc_88

[David Lockmiller]

(11-22-2021 09:14 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  What the Times' editors printed yesterday was not a review, but rather an opinion of the newspaper as to what it believes to be the best nine books for its readers. It is not a review.

Best
Rob

What I am saying is that the New York Times recommendation for purchase of the book should be unbiased.

Would you purchase a Lincoln book that a Lincoln expert (and I believe you previously voiced you approval of Professor Wilentz's "Lincoln" scholarship) has described in the following manner? "What it lacks is historical soundness."

Would you buy the same book as a Christmas gift for a friend or cherished relative?

You must remember, Rob, that not everyone has your level of Lincoln knowledge and therefore would not know that "what [Professor Feldman's book] lacks is historical soundness."

David

[Rob Wick]

David,

If you can show me how it is humanly possible for an opinion to be free of bias, then you are a better man than me. I decided long before Wilentz's review was published that I was going to avoid Feldman's book given his article in the Times. I sold books for a living for over 20 years and not once have I ever told someone not to buy a book because I didn't like it. Not even the dreck that comes from Fox. However, I have always told someone what I felt if asked. One is honest and helpful. The other reeks of bias.

Best
Rob