Adam Rowe Reviews Noah Feldman's "The Broken Constitution"David Weisberg

Further to the posts (here, here, and here) relating to Prof. Noah Feldman’s new book, “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America,” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 12) published a book review by historian Adam Rowe.  It praises as “masterly” some of the book’s analysis of three constitutional questions—making war on the Confederacy, suspending habeas corpus, emancipating slaves—that, Feldman argues, Lincoln resolved in ways that “broke” the Constitution.  But, with regard to Feldman's understanding of Lincoln's views concerning slavery, Rowe says this:

Until the Emancipation Proclamation,” [Feldman] writes, “Lincoln had never been able to present his political goals in moral terms.” To call this judgment wrong is inadequate. It is too weird to be merely wrong. The “real issue,” Lincoln had declared in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 over slavery’s expansion, “is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.

Personally, I think "weird" is just about right.