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A New Right To Property: Civil War Confiscation In The Reconstruction Supreme Court, Daniel W. Hamilton

Daniel W. Hamilton

During the Civil War, both the Union Congress, in the First and Second Confiscation Acts, and the Confederate Congress, in the Sequestration Act, put in place sweeping confiscation programs designed to seize the private property of enemy citizens on a massive scale. This paper compares property confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy. It examines congressional debates, the social impact of confiscation legislation, and the interpretation of confiscation doctrine by the Supreme Court. I contend that the Civil War experiment with confiscation helped cause an important shift in American property ideology and constitutional law by accelerating the rise of liberal …