The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War.(Book review)

Historian, The, 20090129 by Ranney, Joseph A.

The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. By Daniel W. Hamilton. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 231. $39.00.)

The decade of the Civil War played a pivotal role in shaping American law, so much so that Professor Morton Horwitz of Harvard has suggested it forms one of three great eras of American legal history. No one has yet written a definitive history of the era, but in recent years a steady flow of studies of midnineteenth-century public and private law has greatly increased our understanding of its place in American legal history. Daniel W. Hamilton, in his study of wartime property confiscation laws, illuminates another heretofore obscure element of the decade.

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