Amnesty's Origins: Peace, Federal Power, and the Public Good in the Long Civil War Era
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Walser, Heather
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Christina Snyder, Outside Field Member
Michael Nelson, Outside Unit Member
Amy Greenberg, Major Field Member
Rachel Shelden, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Amy Greenberg, Program Head/Chair
Jacob Lee, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Amnesty
Federalism
Civil War
Constitutional History
Federal power
Whiskey Rebellion
Fries Rebellion
Dorr War
Bleeding Kansas
Utah Expedition
Reconstruction - Abstract:
- Amnesty is a contentious and poorly understood issue, both historically and in the modern-era. Typically, legal authorities define amnesty as the forgiveness of past acts granted to multiple people at once by a government authority. The most famous historical act of this power occurred when President Johnson granted amnesty to former Confederates after the American Civil War, an act that had dire consequences for the protection of Black rights. This project provides context for Johnson’s use of amnesty by demonstrating how Americans employed amnesty throughout the nineteenth century as a tool of governance to resolve constitutional debates. Ideas and understandings of amnesty developed alongside the early American state. Prior to the Civil War, Americans frequently used amnesty to resolve various types of conflict and these experiences fundamentally shaped the development of the American state and its legal system. By studying the use of amnesty following uprisings about federal taxes in Pennsylvania in the 1790s, during a violent conflict about sovereignty in Rhode Island in the 1840s, in an effort to avoid war between settlers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the federal government in Utah in the 1850s, as a tool for peace in the battle over slavery in Kansas Territory, and during the Civil War and Reconstruction, this project redefines how Americans used and understood amnesty in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how it asserted federal sovereignty while protecting local power.