Fate Of Their Country Politicians Slavery Extension And The Coming Of The Civil War

Author : Michael F. Holt
Publisher : Hill and Wang
ISBN 13 : 9781429930277
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fate of Their Country written by Michael F. Holt and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2005-06-20 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion. Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result. Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, The Fate of Their Country openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

Author : Michael Fitzgibbon Holt
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0809095181
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fate of Their Country written by Michael Fitzgibbon Holt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion. Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result. Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, "The Fate of Their Country" openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

Author : Michael Fitzgibbon Holt
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of The Civil War written by Michael Fitzgibbon Holt and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Michael F. Holt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199830893
Total Pages : 1296 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party written by Michael F. Holt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written. He offers a panoramic account of the tumultuous antebellum period, a time when a flurry of parties and larger-than-life politicians--Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay--struggled for control as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events--like the Annexation of Texas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act--rocked the country. Amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, emerging as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession.

Author : Eric H. Walther
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780842027991
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Shattering of the Union written by Eric H. Walther and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1850s offered the last remotely feasible chance for the United States to steer clear of Civil War. Yet fundamental differences between North and South about slavery and the meaning of freedom caused political conflicts to erupt again and again throughout the decade as the country lurched toward secession and war. The Shattering of the Union is a concise, readable analysis and survey of the major ideas and events that resulted in the Civil War. The first scholarly synthesis of America's final antebellum decade to be published in more than twenty years, this essential overview incorporates methods and findings by recognized historians on politics, society, race relations, ideology, and slavery. This book is a fascinating look at one of the pivotal decades in U.S. history.

Author : Avery Craven
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226118940
Total Pages : 508 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Coming of the Civil War written by Avery Craven and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1957 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating and profound analysis of the factors which brought a nation into war with itself.

Author : James C. Thompson
Publisher : Commonwealth Books of Virginia
ISBN 13 : 9780982592205
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Birth of Virginia's Aristocracy written by James C. Thompson and published by Commonwealth Books of Virginia. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A 'pocket' history book from Commonwealth Books of Virginia."

Author : Michael F. Holt
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700617876
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book By One Vote written by Michael F. Holt and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2008-10-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With electoral votes disputed in three states, a Democrat winning the popular vote, and the Supreme Court stepping in to overrule Florida court decisions, the presidential election of 1876 was an eerie precursor to that of 2000. Rutherford Hayes's defeat of Samuel Tilden has been dubbed the "fraud of the century"; now one of America's preeminent political historians digs deeper to unravel its real significance. This election saw the highest voter turnout of any in U.S. history-a whopping 82 percent-and also the narrowest margin of victory, as a single electoral vote decided the outcome. Michael Holt offers a fresh interpretation of this disputed election, not merely to rehash claims of fraud but to explain why it was so close. Examining the post-Civil War political environment, he particularly focuses on its most curious feature: that Republicans were the only party in history to retain the presidency in the middle of a severe depression after decisively losing the preceding off-year congressional elections. Holt begins with the election of 1872 to demonstrate how competition for Liberal Republicans shaped the campaign strategies of both parties. He stresses the critical but little-noted importance of Colorado statehood in August-which changed the size of the electoral-vote majority needed to win-and provides a new answer to the vexing question of why a Democratic-controlled Congress had admitted Colorado in time to participate in the presidential election, when without its votes Tilden would have won. And he argues that the high voter turnout was attributable both to Republicans exploiting fears of ex-Confederates recapturing control of the government and to long-apathetic southern Democrats reacting to war memories and Reconstruction realities. By One Vote shows how this election triggered a Republican revival and established the GOP as the Democrats' major competitor. Holt's compelling analysis of the dispute over electoral votes also explains why charges of Republican fraud are questionable-and how Democrats were just as guilty of corruption. A masterly retelling of this controversial episode, Holt's study captures the mood of the country and testifies to the power that hatreds and fears aroused by the Civil War still exercised over the American people.

Author : Michael A. Morrison
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807864323
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Slavery and the American West written by Michael A. Morrison and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

Author : Fergus M. Bordewich
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439124612
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America's Great Debate written by Fergus M. Bordewich and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the 1850s appeals of Western territories to join the Union as slave or free states, profiling period balances in the Senate, Henry Clay's attempts at compromise, and the border crisis between New Mexico and Texas.