The Civil War and Reconstruction remade the United States. The defeat of the Confederacy, end of slavery, and postwar amendments to the Constitution inaugurated a new stage in national life. The most commanding histories of the period have presented the regional and national contests over the legacies of the war. Yet, the forces shaping the nation’s transformation and the effects this process unleashed were not confined within American borders. Drawing on British, American, and Irish archives, this dissertation reveals international influences and consequences at the core of the nineteenth-century reconstitution of the United States. The legal transformation of the United States after the Civil War required the assertion of American federal sovereignty in the international sphere. Fulfillment of key aspects of Reconstruction depended upon recognition by other nations and empires. Certain subjects, such as the terms of United States citizenship, were by definition international matters and necessitated coordination with the laws and policies of foreign powers. Other fundamental issues of Reconstruction, though not intrinsically international, also compelled attention to precedents, developments, and potential ramifications abroad. Agents of the United States government could not resolve the central issues of Reconstruction unilaterally. Their debates and decisions had consequences abroad, particularly in the British Empire, during a critical period of state-building worldwide. Each chapter of this dissertation examines international dimensions of a key question of governance and canonical subject of Civil War and Reconstruction scholarship – emancipation, land reform, democracy, citizenship, treason, and federalism – to gauge the far-reaching factors that shaped American policymaking and its results. The analysis demonstrates the multiple layers of the questions the war unearthed. It also establishes that changes in constitutional and other domestic law were inextricable from the nation’s relations with foreign powers, particularly Britain. This approach captures Reconstruction as the internationally disruptive event that it was and allows for a more complete accounting of what the Civil War and Reconstruction did and did not accomplish. Developments during these years destabilized the nation’s position and commitments in the international realm but did not provide a clear path forward. The transformation of the United States’ role and power in the international realm proved more gradual and restrained than many Americans and Britons anticipated. Divisions over the Constitution as well as challenges emanating from abroad impeded the assertion of federal power both within and beyond the nation’s borders.

The Private Law of Emergency traces the development of the American law of contract in response to four emergencies that occurred between 1860-1940 – the Civil War, World War I, the 1918 pandemic, and the Great Depression. It traces the development of an idea – that the purpose of the law of contract is to preserve certain features of civil society and in this way guard against the corrosive effects of emergency on that society. The thesis explores three broad themes; first, that private law provides a means by which courts have managed the resolution of an emergency; second, that that the way courts have applied private law in response to emergency can tell us something about the true values underlying private law; and third, that the way courts have applied private law in response to emergency tells us something about the public law of emergency – and in particular, the capacity of emergency powers to affect private rights. The thesis considers these developments in the context of parallel developments in legal method – most particularly, the rise of formalism in private law – in the law of equity, and in the positioning of commerce as central to the maintenance of the legitimacy of the American constitutional system across this period. It demonstrates that these developments have suppressed the early tendency of the common law to operate as a form of emergency law.

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This dissertation investigates the relationship between genre and the representation of war-time violence in five texts written during and shortly after the United States Civil War (1861-1865). The texts are The Narrative of Edmund Wright (1864), John William De Forests Miss Ravenels Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), and three short stories by Henry JamesThe Story of a Year (1865), Poor Richard (1867), and A Most Extraordinary Case (1868). These texts deal with the theme of war violence through generic mechanisms associated with the spectrum of writings often dichotomized as romance and realism. The main theoretical approach to genre depends on a distinction between criterial theories of genre and contingency theories of genre. Criterial theories emphasize the shared characteristics of literary texts: that is, criterial theories of genre are classificatory in orientation. Contingency theories emphasize the ways in which social forces influence the act of classification: contingency theories of genre, in other words, concentrate on the notion that genres are social constructs. This dissertation maintains, in line with contingency theory, that genre is affected by the social, political and cultural circumstances of the period in which the genre operates; as a result, this dissertation uses documents from and about the American Civil War to substantiate its claims. The work of Alice Fahs, David Reynolds, and John Frow has influenced the approach to genre theory and to nineteenth-century American literary history. / English