@article{Transformation:1594,
      recid = {1594},
      author = {Rowe, Adam Lynd},
      title = {The Paradox of Union: The Civil War and the Transformation  of American Democracy},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-08},
      pages = {717},
      abstract = {This dissertation analyzes how Republican leaders and  intellectuals embraced a new understanding of their polity  as they scrambled to save it during the Civil War. An  adequate solution to the problem of secession and slavery  required a much broader reconceptualization of the  political system as a whole. But most Republicans did not  see it this way at the time. They sincerely believed that  the conservative and revolutionary elements of their agenda  were not only compatible but complimentary, a belief that  arose almost automatically from their perception of the  “slavepower” as an external threat to their cherished  order, rather than an intrinsic part of it. Far from  inhibiting the Republicans, this illusion united their  hopes and fears into a resolute sense of purpose. Only  gradually, in responding to one emergency after another,  did Republicans begin to accept that the moral and  practical imperatives of the war entailed a fundamental  departure from the constitutional system they were trying  to preserve, a departure that went beyond any particular  issue to redefine the very meaning of free government. My  goal is to show how the key concepts in the antebellum  political vocabulary – liberty, equality, state(s), and  citizen – were refashioned in the violent process by which  an entirely new conception of the Republic emerged from the  failure of the old.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1594},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1594},
}