Excerpt from Commonwealth Reconstructed The justice of my representation will be the more readily disputed because there seems, just now, to be a lull in the storm of our political afflictions, which sanguine and superficial observers readily take for a lasting change in the weather. But, while I am ready to believe that the public business is more honestly conducted to-day in the majority of our capitols and city halls than it was in 1870, I can see no ground for ex pecting that the amelioration will be permanent. Particular enormities may never be repeated, but the species is the native and inevitable product of our present political system, and will multiply in number and variety till the defects of that system are corrected. Moreover, no improvement whatever appears in the competency of the men who are put in charge of the public interests. Nevertheless, the topic in the ensuing discussion where I have most failed to satisfy myself is this very matter of setting forth the existing state of public affairs. The sketch is not only scanty, but broken, unskilful and most incomplete. But I console myself with the reflection that, as no painter was ever yet able to spread upon the canvas the common brute land scape in all its variety of motion, form and color, so must literary art forever fail perfectly to portray the complex, ever changing and innumerable phenomena of political society. I comfort myself also with this, that intelligent readers will easily be able, by recollection and the conclusions of reasonable analogy, to fill out the picture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

The Dark Past offers a historical overview and interpretive guide to all the major cases decided by US Supreme Court that have affected the freedom and rights of Black Americans since 1800. It lends coherence to what could otherwise be a disjointed chronicle of cases and connects the events of the past to the current era of racial inequality.