num_pages: 324
description: Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Michael Vorenberg tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation happened after, not before the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by previous historians, and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution. Michael Vorenberg is an assistant professor of history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a research assistant to David Herbert Donald for his prize-winning biography, Lincoln, and he is a contributor to the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Reader's Companion to the American Presidency. This is his first book.
language: English
title: Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment
titlecomplete: Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)
characters: Lyman Trumbull, Henry Winter Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Salmon P. Chase, James Mitchell Ashley, William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Montgomery Blair
genres: Civil War, Politics, Nonfiction, School, American History, History
ratings_count: 39
series: Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society
publisher: Cambridge University Press