Robert s feldman biography of abraham lincoln

Of all the questions Noah Feldman’s 2021 book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, brings to the fore, the largest greets the reader in the epigraph.

Feldman, Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar, begins his work on the constitutional thinking of Abraham Lincoln with a quip from Jefferson Davis. “A moral crevasse has occurred,” Davis is quoted as saying from the congressional floor in 1850, “fanaticism and ignorance, political rivalry, sectional hate, strife for sectional dominion, have accumulated into a mighty flood, and pour their turgid waters through the broken Constitution.” The question looming here is as obvious as it appears: what is this moral crevasse, and why has Feldman, in a book centered on Lincoln, America’s most famous liberator, chosen the future president of the Confederacy to articulate its opening?

The book turns on this choice.

Feldman paints the American con