Final Freedom

Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers politicians and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Michael Vorenberg tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation happened after not before the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by previous historians and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution. Michael Vorenberg is an assistant professor of history at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. He was a research assistant to David Herbert Donald for his prize-winning biography Lincoln and he is a contributor to the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Reader''s Companion to the American Presidency. This is his first book.