The trauma of the Civil War left Americans with searing questions about what went wrong. The sheer destruction—including more than 600,000 dead—shattered many northern intellectuals’ belief in the superiority of their form of democracy. Was the U.S. Constitution not the providentially inspired document it had been thought to be? This wave of self-examination gave rise to a new interest in unwritten rules. In 1885, the then–political science professor Woodrow Wilson, the son of a southern Confederate family, published a book about Congress that explored the disparity between the promise of
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