Victory of Law - The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War and American Literature 1852-1867

Preface vii Introduction 1(18) Victory of Law: Melville and Reconstruction 19(28) Shadows of Law: Somerset and the Literature of Abolition 47(44) Constitutional Disobedience: Thoreau, Sumner, and the Transcendental Law of the 1850s 91(41) Legal Sentences: Hawthorne's Sovereign Performatives and Hermeneutics of Freedom 132(41) John Bingham's Poetic Constitution 173(26) Notes 199(36) Index 235