Washington Brotherhood by Rachel A. Shelden

States’ rights, they argued, motivated white southerners to leave the union and caused the Confederacy’s downfall. Since the late years of the Civil War, Confederates and their defenders attempted to shift the meaning of the war from a conflict over slavery to one over the equality and sovereignty of the states. This first emphasis comes from a desire to slay continuing Lost Cause dragons. There is good reason for this: the two most pressing elements of the study of federalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been the meaning of “states’ rights” in the conflict between northern and southern states and the role of the Civil War in producing the modern nation-state.

Until recently, Civil War–era political and legal historians primarily viewed federalism as a binary-as the relationship between the federal government and the states. These men and women did not simply interact with the government and the law rather, they were forced to navigate the complex relationships and overlapping authorities among the various governing bodies and regulations that made up the federal system. Federalism-or the distribution of power among different governing bodies-defined how most nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the government, both in theory and in practice. This special issue focuses on the role of federalism in the Civil War era, primarily in the years before the war.

Forum: The Future of Civil War Era Studies.

Reconstruction in Public History and Memory at the Sesquicentennial: A Roundtable Discussion.

Maintaining a Radical Vision of African Americans in the Age of Freedom.

In a Class by Itself: Slavery and the Emergence of Capitalist Social Relations during Reconstruction.

Birthright Citizenship and Reconstruction’s Unfinished Revolution.The Civil War and State-Building: A Reconsideration.Forum: The Future of Reconstruction Studies.

Washington Brotherhood by Rachel A. Shelden