American History - Civil War & Reconstruction

Gender and Jim Crow - Glenda Gilmore

"Historians generally characterize the period between 1877 and the 1950s as one in which African Americans in southern states experienced an overwhelm ing range of civic, economic, and social discrimination reinforced by often horrific racial violence. Gender and Jim Crow demonstrates that, for large numbers of elite and middle-class black North Carolinians, far more complex life experiences underlay this broad political and social narrative." "Gilmore shows that by 1896 North Carolina possessed a significant black middle class that distinguished itself in a variety of educational and religious institutions and produced both male and female leaders who envisioned a future in which their class would be included in public life and they would be judged by their moral and professional achievements rather than primarily by their race. Thus, when disenfranchisement legislation finally came in 1899, the disenfranchisers did not simply enshrine an existing system of racial caste but in fact halted the aspirations of a rising black educated community." - Racial repression at the turn of the century did not simply institutionalize the prevailing trend in race relations; rather, it profoundly reordered society.

William Walker

(May 8, 1824 - September 12, 1860) was an American physician, lawyer, journalist and mercenary, who organized several private military expeditions into Latin America, with the intention of establishing English- speaking colonies under his personal control, an enterprise then known as "filibustering." Walker usurped the presidency of the Republic of Nicaragua in 1856 and ruled until 1857, when he was defeated by a coalition of Central American armies. He was executed by the government of Honduras in 1860.

Texas Revolution

- Alamo - Battle of San Jacinto - The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 - March 6, 1836) was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission near San Antonio de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio, Texas, United States), killing all of the Texian defenders. Santa Anna's cruelty during the battle inspired many Texians—both Texas settlers and adventurers from the United States—to join the Texian Army. Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, ending the revolution.

Inhuman Bondage - Davis

- As David Brion Davis reminds us in Inhuman Bondage, now that we have a fuller and more accurate understanding of slavery "we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture" (p. 226). With this scholarship has come the recognition that racial slavery was "an intrinsic and indispensable part of New World settlement, not an accident or a marginal shortcoming of the American experience" (p. 6). - Throughout the book, he emphasizes the central importance of slavery to the social and economic development of the New World, with particular emphasis on the United States. He also reiterates that throughout history and in different societies, slaveholders have attempted to effect the "animalization" or "bestialization" of those enslaved people whom they claimed as their chattel property. This carefully crafted assertion lies at the heart of his formulation of slavery as "inhuman bondage." Slaveholders tried to dehumanize slaves and use them as they used domestic animals. The paradox of treating people as property lies at the heart of the "problem of slavery," and as Davis shows, the resistance of those enslaved always foiled attempts to deny their humanity. Nevertheless, in slave, and in post-slave, societies, the social and cultural mechanisms that sought to control slaves and their descendants also elevated the status of others. Exploring these themes allows Davis to illustrate how the freedoms and opportunities associated with the American dream have at times been reliant on the exploitation and brutalization of slaves. - The first eight chapters of Inhuman Bondage introduce these central themes and discuss the roots and development of New World slavery. Davis discusses ancient precedents and foundations for the system, as well as the rise of the Western racial thinking that underpinned the Atlantic slave system. He discusses the development of slavery in Brazil and in the West Indies, which he describes as the "true economic center of the New World" (p. 112). However, his main interest is in the area that became the United States. The subtitle of the book indicates that it is about the rise and fall of slavery in the New World as a whole. However, North American themes predominate, and Davis tends to use his discussion of events in South America and the Caribbean as a means of illuminating nineteenth-century North American slavery and emancipation. For example, the chapter on Haiti begins and ends with Frederick Douglass's reflections on the importance of the Revolution. While providing an important analysis of the influence of events in Saint Domingue, Davis places greater emphasis on the American Revolution, highlighting its "legacy of ideology" that popularized individual freedom and natural rights (p. 156). - The final chapters of Inhuman Bondage focus on the nineteenth century, covering slavery in the U.S. South and abolition and resistance to slavery in the Americas. Throughout these chapters, Davis gives masterful syntheses of many of the complex academic debates that have shaped and defined these areas of study, drawing on some of the most recent scholarship. One of Davis's main aims in this book is to highlight the "willed moral achievement" of nineteenth-century abolitionists, and this is an important element of these later chapters (p. 11). He claims to still support most of the arguments that he made in his extended debate with Thomas Haskell about the rise of the British antislavery movement. And yet his analysis seems to diverge from his previous emphasis on the way that "class interest" informed the rise and success of bourgeois antislavery. - Whilst Davis shows some of the tensions between slaves' and abolitionists' aspirations, a more important aim of this book is to emphasize the ways that people overcame difficult obstacles to fight for the principle of freedom. Toward the end of the last chapter, he argues that the revolutionary and emancipationist meaning of the Civil War can serve as a reminder "that some struggles for greater fairness and justice have succeeded; they are part of our past and thus open possibilities in our future" (p. 322). - Chp 12 - Explanations of British Abolitionism - Economic self-interest argument doesn't work - Free all enslaved (contracted) peoples by 1807 on the island, and in its colonies by the 1830s - Long history of power inequalities in GB - Chp 13 - Abolitionism in America - Arg. for Abolition: - Moral argument - Natural rights arg. - Free labor arg. - Self-preservation (AA abolitionists)

Reforging the White Republic - Blum

- Du Bois's and Griffith's competing views of Reconstruction demonstrated that Giles's original vision of postwar America was never fully realized. In the decades following the Civil War, certain aspects of his print were accomplished, while others went tragically unfulfilled. Northern and southern whites did largely forgive one another for the devastating war, and national unity eventually triumphed over sectional animosity. In fact, national reunion helped pave the way for the rise of an overseas American empire at the end of the century. Racial equality and justice, however, remained elusive dreams. By 1900, a dark cloud of racial terror had descended upon the land. Although the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution offered all African Americans full citizenship and black men the right to vote, white supremacist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan and theWhiteLeagues,bulldozed away those privileges.Railroads,hotels,and other public and private institutions became more and more segregated,and even the Supreme Court affirmed racial separation. In the closing decades of the century, a wave of violence drenched America with blood.Between1882and1900,whites from New Orleans to Maine lynched more than seventeen hundred African Americans. How did the beautiful dreams of the mid-1860s devolve into the hellish nightmares of the 1890s? Why did northern whites reconcile with their former opponents and discard their concerns for protection and justice for people of color? - Reforging the White Republic traces the tragedy that followed the Civil War. It focuses on how the post-Civil War reunification of whites, the decline in American race relations, and the rise of a militarized, imperialistic nation were permitted, and even encouraged,by northern whites,who abandoned the hopes for racial equality and brotherhood that were given graphic form in Giles's"Reconstruction." Based upon a wide variety of sources from the postwar years—including newspapers, magazines, personal diaries and letters, convention minutes, sermons, hymns, missionary tracts, travelogues, poems, popular novels, short stories, school primers, children's literature, political speeches, congressional reports, Supreme Court opinions,and political caricatures—this book explores the ways Protestant Christianity in the North helped to forge a new sense of white American nationalism after the Civil War that sanctified the segregation of African Americans and their political disenfranchisement. From the end of the Civil War to the War of 1898, northern religion—its spokesmen and spokeswomen, practitioners, ideologies, and movements—played a critical role in reuniting northern and southern whites, in justifying and nourishing the social and spiritual separation of whites and blacks, and in propelling the United States into global imperialism. Northern white Christians, in short, were essential to the reforging of the white republic. - Edward J. Blum's book proposes to remedy this situation by putting religion—more specifically, the catch-all category of northern Protestantism—at the center of the reunion narrative. Before the nation debated the merits of postwar retribution and reconciliation during Reconstruction, the Protestant denominations—all of which were divided by secession—argued about whether and how to reunite. More was at stake than penance and forgiveness: northern Methodists, for example, continued to occupy southern churches taken during the war. (pp. 31-32). But there were spiritual and political differences of opinion as well, and by the end of 1865, Blum notes, ministers were as divided as the politicians of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, which gathered that December. At the same time as they debated the religious relationship between northern and southern white Protestants, northern ministers discussed the related question of the political position of African Americans. Against the Christian advocates of forgive and forget, Blum offers a "cadre of Yankee preachers" who fought for the civil rights of the freed people and whose religious arguments for racial justice, he asserts, "did a great deal to further radicalize the North" (p. 22).

African Cherokees in Indian Territory - Celia Naylor

- Examines the lives of enslaved Africans as they were removed into Indian Territory with their Cherokee masters in an attempt to "shatter ideas about "kind" Indian masters" and to highlight the intersections between being enslaved outside of the U.S. by people who weren't U.S. citizens themselves - literally no protections. "In African Cherokees in Indian Territory, Celia Naylor attempts a broad-based longitudinal study of the enslaved and freed African-descended people that includes processes of acculturation, identification with the Cherokees, resistance to bondage, and a complex sense of belonging to the Cherokee Nation that had solidified by Oklahoma statehood in 1907. For the most part, Naylor succeeds in her stimulating analysis."

Reconstruction - Foner

- He seeks "to provide ... a coherent, comprehensive, modern account of Reconstruction ... to view the period as a whole, integrating the social, political and economic aspects of Reconstruction into a coherent, analytical narrative" (pp. xxiv, xxvii). Within that broad context, he attempts to develop several unifying themesamong them, "the centrality of the black experience" in Reconstruction, the larger American context of "the emergence of a national state," and exploration of the ways in which the social, economic, political, and moral development of the North affected the course of Reconstruction in the South (pp. xxiv-xxvi). - So essentially, what McPherson has done for Civil War - His long-standing interest in the rise of free labor ideology in America, the early development of the Republican party, and the critical role of black people in the creation of the American nation have all been marshalled to guide his meticulous research in an impressive variety of sources. - Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we see that its "most striking. . . impact" was on the freed black people (p. 410). They were the often hidden heart of the affair. - THIS IS AA AGENCY AT WORK - "Rather than passive victims of of the action of others or simply a "problem" confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction. During the Civil War, their actions helped force the nation down the road to emancipation, and in the aftermath of that conflict, their quest for individual and community autonomy did much to establish Reconstruction's political and economic agenda." (xxiv-xxv) - Although kept from land owners - they took every economic opportunity they could - they participated early in 1877 Reconstruction politics in the South - Blocked by White Supremacist terror - and ultimately the failure of the Republicans to support Re. for any longer - inherent racism? - WHITE TERROR can be seen as a stronger response here.

Charles Francis Adams

- Mentioned in Both Railroaded and Foner's Reconstruction - Charles Francis Adams Sr. (August 18, 1807 - November 21, 1886) was an American historical editor, politician and diplomat. He was the son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams, of whom he wrote a major biography. - Adams served in the Massachusetts State Senate, before running unsuccessfully as vice-presidential candidate for the Free Soil Party in the election of 1848. During the Civil War Adams was Abraham Lincoln's foreign minister in London, where he played a key role in keeping Britain neutral while southern agents were trying to achieve official recognition of the Confederacy. That meant conducting dialogue with both sides and monitoring the British connection in the supply of commerce raiders.

What were the main plans of Reconstruction?

- Presidential (Lincoln) - Radical Republican (Congressional) - Presidential (Johnson)

The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War- RUGEMER

- Rugemer summarizes the book's argument clearly in the introduction: "Britain's abolition of slavery should be understood as a seminal event in the history of the United States, a critical moment in the drift toward the Civil War thirty years later" (p. 6). As this quotation suggests, Rugemer adopts an Atlantic approach to understanding the antebellum United States. - The first part of the book deals with "the lessons of Abolitionism" (p. 15). Rugemer carefully highlights the close connections between the United States and the West Indies in a variety of areas. These included the significant amount of trade between the two areas, but also the missionary and religious connections as well as the widespread circulation of West Indian newspapers in the U.S. This meant that developments in the West Indies, such as the slave rebellions in Barbados, Demerara, and Jamaica in the early nineteenth century, were well known in the U.S. For the planters in the West Indies, these rebellions were caused by the abolitionists: it was Wilberforce and the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery that explained the rebellions. - In the second part of The Problem of Emancipation, Rugemer looks at "the lessons of abolition" (p. 143). Again, the West Indian experience of emancipation was important. Abolitionists such as James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball visited Antigua and reported on the success, as they saw it, of immediate emancipation. Their argument helped to convince William Ellery Channing, a prominent American abolitionist, to support immediate emancipation. At the same time, proslavery advocates used the West Indian experience to undermine the idea of emancipation. Among these was the American consul in Kingston, Jamaica, Robert Monroe Harrison, who believed that emancipation in the West Indies was part of a British attempt to overthrow slavery in the United States. For the British, as Harrison argued, destroying slavery in the United States would ruin cotton production and would materially help Britain's Indian empire. Moreover, for Harrison and for other defenders of slavery, emancipation in Jamaica and the West Indies was a catastrophic failure: it was a warning of what could happen if slavery ended in the South.

White Terror - Trelease

- Should instead be subtitled "The Democratic Return to Power during Reconstruction." -For the main thrust of its story is that Southern Democrats, in the guise of the Klan, intimidated and murdered their way back into political offices after the Radical plan of Reconstruction had shorn them of power. - The Republican South, this book argues, was redeemed by the Democrats not, as William A. Dunning and his followers said, because of Radical corruption and misrule, and not, as a number of leading historians since the 1930s have maintained, because of the complicated maneuvers of businessmen, especially Northern and Southern railroad builders, but chiefly because of Democratic terror and the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy. What we have here, in effect, is Dunning in reverse, where the Democrats endlessly abuse Republicans, and not the other way around. - In his unfailingly interesting pages he repeatedly refutes, apparently without realizing it, his own notion of a Ku Klux Klan con- spiracy. More often than not, his Klan consists of isolated groups of terrorists, each not possess- ing the vaguest idea what the others were doing and how and where the others were doing it. Often the Klan bungled even the simplest acts of terrorism. The lack of evidence of con- spiracy, it seems to me, has forced Professor Trelease to present his discussion by locality and by state. If the terror had really been conspiratorial, it would unquestionably have led the author to organize his material chronologically. On several occasions, moreover, Professor Trelease has by his own admission attributed the violence of roaming bands or "prowling vagabonds" to the Klan. And because he neglects the papers of Northern Democrats, he has no way of showing Northern involvement in any conspiracy.

Nullification Crisis

- The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis in 1832-33, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, which involved a confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government. The crisis ensued after South Carolina declared that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of the state. - The nation suffered an economic downturn throughout the 1820s, and South Carolina was particularly affected. Many South Carolina politicians blamed the change in fortunes on the national tariff policy that developed after the War of 1812 to promote American manufacturing over its European competition. The controversial and highly protective Tariff of 1828 (known to its detractors as the "Tariff of Abominations") was enacted into law during the presidency of John Quincy Adams. The tariff was opposed in the South and parts of New England. By 1828, South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. Its opponents expected that the election of Jackson as President would result in the tariff being significantly reduced.When the Jackson administration failed to take any actions to address their concerns, the most radical faction in the state began to advocate that the state itself declare the tariff null and void within South Carolina. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun, the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification. - On July 14, 1832, before Calhoun had resigned the Vice Presidency in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification. Jackson signed into law the Tariff of 1832. The reductions were too little for South Carolina, and on November 24, 1832, a state convention adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and unenforceable in South Carolina. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed both the Force Bill—authorizing the President to use military forces against South Carolina—and a new negotiated tariff, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which was satisfactory to South Carolina. The South Carolina convention reconvened and repealed its Nullification Ordinance on March 15, 1833, but three days later nullified the Force Bill as a symbolic gesture to maintain its principles. - The crisis was over, and both sides could find reasons to claim victory. The tariff rates were reduced and stayed low to the satisfaction of the South, but the states' rights doctrine of nullification remained controversial. By the 1850s the issues of the expansion of slavery into the western territories and the threat of the Slave Power became the central issues in the nation.

What conditions precipitated the coming of the Civil War

- The failure of the Founding Fathers to address the issue of slavery in the Constitution - Coupled with the realization of land expansion long-sought after by Colonials/Americans - forcing the issue of the expansion of slavery into the American consciousness - Kentucky & Virginia Resolutions - Alien & Sedition acts of 1798 were unconstitutional - The LP and Indian Removals of 1830s pushed Indians onto western lands - clearing way for Western settlement by Americans - Kentucky and Virginia Re - Missouri Compromise - 1820 - (Henry Clay) Missouri comes into union as slave state - Maine breaks from VT and comes in as slave state to offset - 36-30 Line where slavery cannot exist north of that for NEW TERRITORIES - Texas Revolution - 1836/7- based on the occupancy of Americans who wanted to expand slavery West of the states - Oregon Territory - War With Mexico - 1845 - Purposely engaged by Pol to gain territory / CA, NM, AZ - Treaty of GH - 1848 - Compromise of 1850 - CA as free state / NM/UTAH POP. SOV. - Henry Clay architect - Kansas / Nebraska Act - 1854 - KS/NE Popular Sovereignty - Bleeding Kansas - Bleeding Kansas 1855-6 - People flooding into KS from MO to vote to skew the numbers towards Slave - violence erupts - Sacking of Lawrence - Dredd Scott - 1857 - Slaves not free in Northern territories - Raid on Harper's Ferry - 1859 - Fort Sumpter - 1861

The Impending Crisis - Potter

- There is scarcely a significant political issue or figure on the national level, from the receding administration of James K. Polk with its Democratic consensus disintegrating under the strains of the Mexican War to the emerging administration of Lincoln with its Republi- can consensus coalescing under the strains of sectional pressures ap- proaching the flashpoint of civil war, which is not treated with consum- mate skill and insight - Compromise of 1850, but so more tellingly denoted by Potter as the "Armistice of 1850." The dramatic unity of the book's first five chapters and of its narrative matrix as a whole is shaped by Potter's observation that the expansionist drive which had carried Americans to victory in the Mexican War was, for all its hoopla and apparent benefits, "an ominous fulfillment for the impulses of American nationalism. It reflected a sinister dual quality in this nationalism, for at the same time when national forces... were achieving an external triumph, the very triumph itself was subjecting their nationalism to internal stresses which, within thirteen years, would bring the nation to a supreme crisis" (p. 6). Potter then succinctly links this dualism with the unresol- ved, and perhaps unresolvable, issue raised by America's success in the Mexican War - Rejects that there is a profound economic or cultural difference between N&S that would lead to war

Fillibustering (19th c) - Military

A filibuster or freebooter, in the context of foreign policy, is someone who engages in an (at least nominally) unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country or territory to foment or support a revolution. The term is usually used to describe United States citizens who fomented insurrections in Latin America in the mid-19th century (Texas, California, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia), but is also applicable in the modern day. Filibuster expeditions have also occasionally been used as cover for government approved deniable operations (see also False flag). A notable late 20th Century example of this would be the Argentinian 'scrap metal merchants' who landed on South Georgia at the outset of the Falklands War. Filibusters are irregular soldiers who (normally) act without official authority from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure. The freewheeling actions of the filibusters of the 1850s led to the name being applied figuratively to the political act of filibustering in the United States Congress. Unlike a mercenary, a filibuster leader/commander works for himself, whilst a mercenary leader works for others.

Theodore S. Wright

Abolitionist - Pres. Minister in NYC - founding member of American Anti-Slavery Society (c 1830s)

Frederick Douglas

African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the American Constitution. When radical abolitionists under the motto "No Union With Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to dialogue with slave owners, he famously replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

Angelina Grimke

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (February 20, 1805 - October 26, 1879) was an American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. The time of her greatest fame was between 1836, when a letter she sent to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a courageous and brilliant speech to abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia, with a hostile crowd throwing stones and shouting outside the hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that two-year period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women's rights. Drawing her views from natural rights theory (as set forth in the Declaration of Independence), the Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own experience of slavery and racism in the South, Grimké argued for the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman. She was particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice. When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké fiercely defended women's right to make speeches and participate in political action. In May 1838, Grimké married Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist. They lived in New Jersey with her sister Sarah Moore Grimké, and raised three children. Angelina and Sarah were active in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in the 1870s.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies - Ayers

Ayers draws on this vast archive in presenting a history of how the residents of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, some one hundred miles apart, experienced the coming of war and the first years of conflict. Commencing his account in 1859, Ayers describes how John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry shook both counties, increasing distrust between the sections, as that which divided white Americans north and south appeared in starker relief than that which united them. Franklin County voters chose Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860; the following winter Augusta's delegates to the Virginia secession convention pro- nounced their support of Union, slavery, and Virginia, only to see support for the first collapse in April 1861, followed by Virginia's decision to join the Confederacy. Both counties raised volunteer forces, although Franklin lagged behind Augusta; during the next two years, as war waged and then escalated into a contest in which slavery was explicitly at stake, whites weighed costs of conflict versus prospects for victory while blacks sought freedom, some by enlisting in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Ayers gracefully draws the curtain just as the armies collide at Gettysburg. - Although Ayers is careful not to fall into simplistic explanations concerning slavery's role in the conflict, he leaves no doubt that it was somehow at the core of the conflict - Not all white Southerners who embraced slavery supported secession; not all white Northerners opposed slavery, and far fewer believed in racial equality. - Ayers's description of the Confederate inva- sion of Pennsylvania in 1863, in which blacks fled the area when possible in an effort to resist capture and reenslavement by the advancing Rebels. He also recounts the ways in which war tore at the countryside, as Union and Confederate soldiers took turns foraging, con- fiscating, and destroying what they came across in enemy territory. Some of the descrip- tions of such activity remind us that the war became a hard one long before 1864. - Ayers's narrative exemplifies James McPherson's emphasis on the concept of contingency as critical to the ebb and flow of events during this period. Although residents of Franklin and Augusta counties shared much common ground in certain respects, the secession crisis and the coming of war polarized them in opposition, although in neither case were internal divisions obliterated - Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Ayers's book is that it offers readers a wonder- ful example of how Civil War historians should merge battlefront and home front to offer a more comprehensive, interconnected, and enriched understanding of the experience of war on all people and how in turn those people attempted to shape the course of events and their own destinies

The Half Has Never Been Told - Baptist

Baptist sharply challenges what he claims are historians' major assumptions about slavery's role. These conceptions view slavery as a premodern economic institution, largely separate from American industrialization and conclude that slavery was flatly inconsistent with the political economy principles of the new American republic, so it would inevitably end and free labor and northern interests would prevail (xvi-xviii). Baptist argues to the contrary that slavery was capitalist and economically modern; that the wealth slaves created financed American industrialization; and that slavery's expansion was principally the result of a long-term, mutually profitable economic and political bargain between northern and southern whites. Historians have also assumed that "the worst thing about slavery" was that it denied African Americans modern citizenship's benefits (xviii). In response, Baptist contends that slavery also "killed people, in large numbers," made "them live in terror and hunger," and "stole everything" from survivors (xix). - Practice of Slavery was a CAPITALIST VENTURE (would argue against the Paternalism of Genovese) that can be shown through - Accounting - Inventory The book supports its arguments principally by analyzing the expansion of the interstate slave trade and cotton slavery. It does so by examining three primary dimensions along which slavery changed over time: its lived experience for blacks; its economic character and effects; and its influence on politics. Baptist creates what appears to be a powerful portrait of everyday experiences for blacks. - The book provides an extended argument for a close relationship between slavery and the growth of American capitalism. Baptist claims that enslavers (his term for slaveholders) and slave traders were entrepreneurs in much the same way northern capitalists were, and that slavery was economically successful enough to have survived and prospered after 1865, if the country had not gone to war. - The second aspect of Baptist's economic analysis is an argument about the efficiency of slaves' cotton production and its causes. Baptist claims that antebel- lum slavery expansion was a new phenomenon because "it led to continuous increases in productivity per person—what economists call 'efficiency'" He focuses on sharply increased antebellum productivity in picking cotton and contends that it arose principally from systematic record keeping and supervision through the "pushing system" and widespread use of "torture" - The third element of Baptist's economic argument is chapter 9's claim that slavery's profits essentially funded the Industrial Revolution in the United States. He contends that northern growth and the fortunes of middle- and upper-class northern whites in particular were built on cotton slavery.

Dredd Scott

Dred Scott (c. 1799 - September 17, 1858) was an enslaved African American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott Decision." Scott claimed that he and his wife should be granted their freedom because they had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal. The United States Supreme Court decided 7-2 against Scott, finding that neither he nor any other person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, and therefore Scott could not bring suit in federal court under diversity of citizenship rules. Moreover, Scott's temporary residence outside Missouri did not bring about his emancipation under the Missouri Compromise, which the court ruled unconstitutional as it would "improperly deprive Scott's owner of his legal property."

American Slavery, American Freedom - Morgan

Edmund S. Morgan's classic 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia connected the calamity of Bacon's Rebellion, namely the potential for lower-class revolt, with the colony's transition over to slavery: "..But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on...." [26]

West From Appomattox - Richardson

Following the path blazed by (among others) William A. Dunning and David Donald, Heather Cox Richardson offers a definition of "reconstruction" that is broader and more encompassing than the traditional one that concerns defining freedom for African Americans and reestablishing civil government in the states of the former Confederacy. For her, this "new birth of freedom" was nothing less than a fundamental debate over what sort of social and political order should emerge from the war and the role of the federal government in shaping that order. The reconstruction of the American republic pitted advocates of a free-labor society founded on serving "the public interest" against so-called special interest groups; each sought government intervention to gain equality and opportunity. In short, the question was: What should be the relationship of the federal government to its citizens? At the heart of those issues was the formation of middle class America and what it believed should be the American mission at home and, eventually, abroad. Even as they espoused individualism, many Americans sought government to serve their interests at the expense of others. They attached moral and social judgments to the sorts of people who advocated reforms, argued that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the existing order, and asserted that reformers were asking the government to secure for them what they could not secure for themselves. Richardson does what she can to package many of the political debates of the late nineteenth century into this format, and in the process she sheds new light on the texture as well as the text of political debate.

Victorian America and the Civil War - Rose

For social historians, Anne Rose's Victorian America and the Civil War will cause some initial discomfort but will ultimately offer a provocative view on the intellectual and cultural effects of the war. As the title suggests, Rose believes that the Nineteenth Century was neither transformed by the arrival of war nor radically affected by its losses. Instead, she argues: that the most decisive social and intellectual trends of the mid-century period were in place before the war and were not transformed fundamentally by the conflict. . . . The war encouraged bureaucratic organization, personal autonomy, and the expansion of experimental mental and sentimental-frames of reference. But it did not cause the central dilemma of the Victorians to be redefined. This conclusion is contrary to most recent scholarship on the social role of the Civil War. Certainly, the war radically changed the lives of freedmen and bondsmen alike, had enormous ramifications for the political processes of both the North and the South, and reformulated the ideas of nation and state. When Rose argues, instead, that the war acted as an arena for ongoing constructions of culture in the nineteenth century rather then as a transformative experience, the immediate reaction is to look to her methods and evidence in an attempt to debunk her findings.

Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter is a sea fort in Charleston, South Carolina, notable for two battles of the American Civil War. It was one of a number of many special forts planned after the War of 1812, combining high walls and heavy masonry, and classified as Third System, as a grade of structural integrity. Work started in 1829, but was incomplete by 1860, when South Carolina seceded from the Union. The First Battle of Fort Sumter opened on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery fired on the Union garrison. These were the first shots of the war, and continued all day, watched by many civilians in a celebratory spirit. The fort had been cut off from its supply line, and surrendered next day. The Second Battle of Fort Sumter (September 8, 1863) was a failed attempt by the Union to re-take the fort, dogged by rivalry between army and navy commanders. Although the fort was reduced to rubble, it remained in Confederate hands until it was evacuated as Sherman marched through South Carolina in February 1865.

Roll Jordan Roll - Genovese

Historiographical Article: Adam Rothman - Arg: Old South was a "historically unique kind of paternalist society" with slavery at its core. - Masters had obligation to care for slaves, and slaves had an obligation to obey. - When they did not obey, masters had an obligation to punish them - Slave owners benevolence justified their violence - Christianity shaped slaveowners worldviews - Slaves accepted paternalism because they had no choice - but struggled to preserve themselves when possible - WHICH ISN'T ACCEPTANCE AT ALL - Walter Johnson (Soul By Soul) response: - Genovese unduly minimized the significance of the buying and selling of slaves, which was crucial to the southern economy and the terrorizing of slaves and which undercuts the idea that planters saw their relationship to slaves as essentially "paternal." - BABPIST would argue that this much more an economic relationship than a Paternalistic relationship. - Agency paradigm has outlived its usefulness, but no other alternative paradigm seems poised to replace it. REVIEW: - Neo Marxist Analysis of Slavery in the Old South - Revolves around 3 themes: - Paternalism - Accommodation - Resistance - Book 1 delineates the structural parameters of Southern slavery based on the inextricable paternalistic union of master and slave classes - Books 2 and 3 analyze the accommodation of slaves to this reciprocal relationship in their workship, work, status differentiations, domestic institutions, and leisure activities Book 4 illuminates various forms of resistance to the same paternalistic relationship. Genovese argues that "accommodation and resistance developed as two forms of a single process by which the slaves accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously fought...for moral as well as physical survival." (658) On black Christianity: Genovese argues that "black Christianity offered profound spiritual strength to a people at bay, but it also imparted a political weakness, which dictated...acceptance of the hegemony of the oppressor." (284) House servants: The intermediary role between other blacks and whites caused them to become "the principal carries of a third culture, neither African nor Euro-American." (365)

Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War - Huston

James L. Huston's book offers a sweeping interpretation of U.S. history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that roots the causes of the Civil War in differing conceptions of property among northerners and southerners. Whereas southern slaveholders claimed the sanctity of property in enslaved humans, citizens in states north of the Mason and Dixon Line increasingly found such property contradictory to their ideal of "free village labor" (p. xiv). Five chapters survey popular political ideology with respect to property rights from the colonial period to the eve of the Civil War. These chapters treat southern defensiveness regarding slave property, the growth of antislavery and free-labor ideology in the North, and the escalating debate over the constitutionality of slavery expansion into the western territories. Two long chapters examine the political realignment of the 1850s. Huston's overview of developing public opinion regarding slave property offers much useful information. His comparison of wealth and economic activity between the northern and southern states, for instance, reveals that both sections depended heavily on agriculture, although to vastly different ends. He echoes earlier commentators who emphasized the importance of slave property to the wealth of the South and the nation, and he effectively musters testimony from contemporary partisans of slavery to indicate the strength of their commitment to preserving it. Invoking the political philosophy of abstract property rights, South Carolinian Armistead Burt in 1851 justified secession as a means to preserve "the institution of African slavery, unimpaired and unmolested" and to assure for slaveholders "the quiet and undisturbed enjoyment of this species of property, as well as the means of making it profitable and desirable" (p. 185). In Huston's view, Alabamian William Lowndes Yancey's oft-quoted assertion that "Twenty-eight hundred millions of dollars" in slave property, along with the fate of "four millions of slaves" and "the social and domestic relations of the eight millions of whites of the South," hung in the balance during the election of 1860, identifies "all the variables necessary to explain southern secession and the coming of the Civil War" (p. 24).

This Republic of Suffering - Faust

Key Questions & Thesis • Americans between 1861 & 1865 undertook a kind of work (related to death) that hasn't been adequately understood/recognized o Work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking • How did Americans prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it & seek to understand it? • How did individuals' confrontations with dying and killing transform society, culture, and politics into what became a broader republic of shared suffering? o Took young, healthy men & often instantly destroyed them w/disease --> marked a sharp & alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die o Shared suffering by the war's end overrode persisting differences about the meanings of race, citizenship and nationhood to establish sacrifice & its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite o Made wives into widows & children into orphans o Expansion of federal power transformed postwar nation ▪ Shaped enduring national structures & commitments (e.g. national cemeteries, Civil War pension system) ▪ Intertwined sacrifice and state as gov. attended to needs of those who had died in its service ▪ Presense & fear of death touched Civil War Americans' most fundamental sense of who they were, for in its threat of termination and transformation, death inevitably inspired self-scrutiny & self-definition

Nat Turner's Revolt

Nat Turner's Rebellion (also known as the Southampton Insurrection) was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, during August 1831.Led by Nat Turner, rebel slaves killed anywhere from 55 to 65 people, the highest number of fatalities caused by any slave uprising in the Southern United States. The rebellion was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterwards. The rebellion was effectively suppressed at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, 1831.

The North Star

Newspaper started by Frederick Douglas

Battle Cry of Freedom - McPhereson

REVIEW: - Exploiting that front-running research, McPherson strives "to integrate the political and military events of this era with important social and economic developments to form a seamless web of synthesizing up-to- date scholarship with my own research and interpretation" (p. ix). NOTES: - Integrates political and military events of the era w/important social and economic developments to form seamless web synthesizing up-to-date scholarship - Prologue • Mexican American War o Started by James Polk (Dem) in interest of territorial expansion & opposed by Whigs (didn't want more Mexican territory) ▪ Enlarged US land base by 25% & reduced Mexico's by 50% o Americans won bc: ▪ Mexicans were even more riven by faction ▪ Marksmanship ▪ Professionalism and courage of junior officers ▪ Doesn't mention fact that Native American wars had paved way for Americans. - ▪ Growth facilitated by ▪ Transportation revolution ▪ Technological innovation ▪ Westward expansion ▪ Slave grown crops ▪ By 1860, nascent outline of modern economy of mass consumption, mass production & capital-intensive agriculture visible ▪ Development uneven across different regions & industries • Sectional conflict o Bank of the United States ▪ Chief symbol of capitalist development during 1830s & scapegoat for its perceived ills ▪ Most polarizing issue in state politics until late 1840s o Concerned primarily w/future of slavery ▪ Greatest danger to American survival @ midcentury (more so than class tension & ethnic division) ▪ Up to 1840s: Controversy focused on the morality of the institution where it already existed & passions could be contained by the 2 party system ▪ 1840s: Controversy focused on the expansion of slavery into new territories it became irrepressible - Was conflict irrepressible and if so when did it become irrepressible. ▪ 1850: Slavery came to emphasize more sectional differences than similarities (language, Constitution, legal system, commitment to republican institutions, predominantly Protestant religion, British ethnic heritage, history, memories of a common struggle for nationhood) - 2. Mexico Will Poison Us Strains on 2 party system... • Polk (Dem.; 1844-48) o US expanded by 2/3 during one-term administration (largest acquisition of territory compared to all presidents) o Settlement of Oregon Boundary (north of 39th parallel) w/Great Britain o "Mr. Polk's War" against Mexico ▪ Fought primarily for TX, but also for CA & NM ▪ Percipitated for calls of annexation by American settlers in CA ▪ Whigs ▪ Accused Polk of having provoked war by sending American troops into territory claimed by Mexico ▪ Placed faith in mission more than in annexation ▪ Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848): ▪ American seizure of NM & upper CA ▪ $15 million payment by US to Mexico ▪ US assumption of Mexican debts to American citizens ▪ Recognition of Rio Grande boundary of Texas ▪ Sparked agitation over question of slavery in the new territories ▪ Wilmot Proviso ▪ Aimed to exclude slavery from newly acquired territories ▪ Motivated by antislavery confiction + ire of northern Democrats who were tired of southern domination of the party & vexed w/Polk for compromising instead of fighting for the Oregon boundary ("fifty four or fight!") ▪ Caused realignment (Democrats vs. Whigs --> Northern D/Ws vs. Southern D/Ws) ▪ Eventually blocked by South's greater power in the Senate • Slavery o Free Soil :"Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men" ▪ Beliefs about slavery ▪ Less efficient than free labor, which motivated by wages & ambition for upward mobility rather than coercion of the lash ▪ Undermined dignity of manual work by linking it w/servility & thereby degraded white labor ▪ Inhibited education and social improvements ▪ Kept poor whites & slaves in ignorance ▪ Must be kept out of new territories ▪ Supported by: ▪ Abolitionists ▪ Slavery = violation of human rights that needs to be immediately expiated ▪ Whigs + some Democrats from Yankee Belt ▪ Bondage = evil (socially repressive, economically backward & politically harmful to interests of free states) ▪ Whigs + supporters of Wilmot Proviso ▪ Slavery not the most crucial matter & therefore open to compromise on the issue o Southerners: Late 1830s-1840s: "necessary evil" argument --> "positive good" ▪ Great moral, social, and political blessing to slaves and masters ▪ Civilized African savages and provided them w/more security than they would have in Britain & North ▪ Released whites from menial tasks, elevating white labor & protecting it from degrading competition w/free blacks ▪ Established foundation for elite upper class to cultivate arts and public service o Efforts to heal sectional rift ▪ Failed: Calhoun resolutions aimed to deny Congress' right to exclude slave property from territories ▪ Failed: Extend Missouri Compromise line through middle of new territories to the Pacific ▪ Popular sovereignty aimed to allow citizens to decide issue of slavery • Zachary Taylor "Rough and Ready" (Whig; 1848-52) o Slaveholding, war hero who ran against Winfield Scot & Henry Clay o Free-soil wolf in the clothing of a state's rights sheep o Broke slavery stalemate by bypassing territorial stage & admitting CA & NM directly as free states o Viewed by Southerners as a traitor o Death marked turning point in sectional crisis • California gold rush o Territory's quest to become 31st state sparked renewed sectional crisis back East

The Blundering Generation

The Blundering Generation school argues that radically different societies can co-exist without going to war. Instead, a series of mistakes and misjudgments by a "blundering generation" of politicians allowed extremists to dominate, leading eventually to war. - Blundering Generation school by tracing events from the 1830s to early 1861 and pointing out some of the errors made by politicians and the actions of extremists that contributed to the coming of the War. Among topics covered are the rise of radical abolitionism in the 1830s; the Mexican War of the 1840s; the Compromise of 1850, especially the Fugitive Slave Act and the failure to enforce it; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent civil war in "Bleeding Kansas"; the Dred Scott case of 1857; John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859; and Lincoln's election in 1860.

Compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-48). The compromise, drafted by Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and brokered by Clay and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, reduced sectional conflict. Controversy arose over the Fugitive Slave provision. The Compromise was greeted with relief, although each side disliked specific provisions. - Texas surrendered its claim to New Mexico, as well as its claims north of the Missouri Compromise Line. It retained the Texas Panhandle and the federal government took over the state's public debt. - California was admitted as a free state with its current boundaries. - The South prevented adoption of the Wilmot Proviso that would have outlawed slavery in the new territories,[1] and the new Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory were allowed, under the principle of popular sovereignty, to decide whether to allow slavery within their borders. In practice, these lands were generally unsuited to plantation agriculture and their settlers were uninterested in slavery. - The slave trade (but not slavery altogether) was banned in the District of Columbia. - A more stringent Fugitive Slave Law was enacted. The Compromise became possible after the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor, who, although a slave owner, had favored excluding slavery from the Southwest. Whig leader Henry Clay designed a compromise, which failed to pass in early 1850, due to opposition by both pro-slavery southern Democrats, led by John C. Calhoun, and anti-slavery northern Whigs. Upon Clay's instruction, Douglas then divided Clay's bill into several smaller pieces and narrowly won their passage over the opposition of those with stronger views on both sides.

How did Reconstruction end?

The Compromise of 1877 - Rutherford B. Hayes (R) gets elected, and in return the Radical Republican support for occupied Reconstruction in the South comes to an end.

The Irrepressible Conflict

The Irrepressible Conflict school argues that the North and South were becoming such different societies that they could no longer co-exist in one nation, and war was the inevitable consequence. However, the historians of this school do not all agree on what the crucial differences were between North and South. - Irrepressible Conflict school by highlighting some of the ways in which North and South were growing apart. It looks at economic factors, such as the growing importance of manufacturing and the much more extensive railroad system in the North compared to the South's continued reliance on slavery and agriculture. It illustrates the vitality of education in the North compared to the South. It also looks at religion and reform, as these became dividing rather than uniting influences.

Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (or Resolves) were political statements drafted in 1798 and 1799, in which the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures took the position that the federal Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional. The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to declare unconstitutional acts of Congress that were not authorized by the Constitution. In doing so, they argued for states' rights and strict constructionism of the Constitution. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 were written secretly by Vice President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively.

Virginia Slave Codes

The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 were a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia's House of Burgesses regulating activities related to interactions between slaves and citizens of the Crown colony of Virginia. The enactment of the Slave Codes are considered to be the consolidation of slavery in Virginia, and served as the foundation of Virginia's slave legislation. These codes effectively embedded the idea of white supremacy into law by the following racist devices: - Established new property rights for slave owners - Allowed for the legal, free trade of slaves with protections granted by the courts - Established separate courts of trial - Prohibited blacks, regardless of free status, from owning arms [weapons]. - Blacks could not strike a white for any reason - Whites could not be employed by Blacks - Allowed for the apprehension of suspected runaways

Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso proposed an American law to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War. The conflict over the proviso was one of the major events leading to the American Civil War. Congressman David Wilmot first introduced the proviso in the United States House of Representatives on August 8, 1846. It passed the House but failed in the Senate, where the South had greater representation. It was reintroduced in February 1847 and again passed the House and failed in the Senate. In 1848, an attempt to make it part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also failed. Sectional political disputes over slavery in the Southwest continued until the Compromise of 1850.

Soul By Soul - Johnson

The nineteenth-century domestic slave trade transplanted two-thirds of a million bondsmen from the Upper South to the Black Belt in the half-century before the Civil War. They were sold as punishment, to satisfy debts, to settle an estate, or to capitalize on a "surplus" resulting from the decline of plantation agriculture or the "breeding" policies of owners. One hundred thousand passed through the New Orleans slave market alone. Walter Johnson, an assistant professor of history at New York University, deftly escorts readers into that slave market, exposing the nuances of merchandising and the inner hopes and fears of the captives themselves, which will enlighten even those already familiar with the topic. The most striking theme in Soul by Soul is the degree to which slaves were not simply victims; they also influenced the transactions that they embodied. Slave traders coached or threatened them to appear healthy and skillful. But as bondsmen sized up potential purchasers, some, at considerable risk, presented themselves either positively to gain a more "humane" owner, or negatively to avoid a cruel master or a harsh fate on a sugar plantation. But in either case, if they were found to be not as sound or adept as advertised, they might suffer the wrath of a buyer who not only found himself misled, but whose self-image as a skillful judge of black talent and health had been dealt a humiliating blow. Although Louisiana's law of redhibition--essentially a warranty--allowed purchasers to return misrepresented slaves, it was not automatic that the new owner could gain satisfaction or vindication. Although the southern white gentry vilified slave traders, Johnson reminds us that slave owners were hardly their moral superiors; without their willingness to regard a slave as "a person with a price," slave trading would only have survived on the misfortunes of bankruptcy. The traders did, however, often deserve their reputations as less-than-honest businessmen. By the time slaves arrived in New Orleans after marching for weeks in a coffle, or confined aboard a river or ocean vessel, many were sick. Others had been sold precisely because they were unwell or unwilling to work. While traders sought to hide their goods' human biographies, prospective buyers relied on their own intuitions and the collective assessments of other whites in the slave pens to construct their own descriptions of those whose purchase they were considering. To be a southern white man of substance was not simply to own slaves, but to be an expert judge of their character and capabilities. Soul by Soul is not business history; Johnson chooses not to document the commercial successes and misfortunes of individual slave traders. Rather, it is an impressive social and intellectual history, thoroughly documented, enlivened with the voices of frightened but often canny slaves and self-confident but sometimes duped purchasers. Graduate students and academics alike will profit from its insights. When Johnson refers to Louisiana sugar plantations as "killing fields," however, he reinforces a current tendency to misappropriate uniquely historical terminology. Let "holocaust" be reserved for Hitler's atrocities, and "killing fields" for the carnage in Cambodia. Historians may want to adopt the practice of Afrocentrists who use "maafa" to refer to New World slavery.

Free Soil, Free Men, Free Labor - Eric Foner

The success of the early Republican party, Eric Foner argues in this rich and insightful volume, lay in "the creation and articulation of an ideology which blended personal and sectional interest with morality so perfectly that it became the most potent political force in the nation" (p. 309). His attempt has been to trace and analyze the contours of that ideology and by demonstrating the clear and present threat it posed to the very foundation of southern society, to illuminate the causes of the Civil War. Based on thorough research in both primary and secondary sources, and presented in lucid, graceful prose, Foner's findings merit the attention of all serious students of antebellum America. The key to the Republican creed, Foner contends, lay in the concept of "free labor," a notion which affirmed the superiority of an open, mobile, and prosperous northern society in which work was both honored and rewarded and which damned as backward and subversive of national well-being the slave-based society of the South. Thus, although Republicans might disagree over questions of economic policy, nativism, race, and the morality of human bondage, all agreed that slavery and the cancerous civilization it supported must be stayed if the nation were to fulfill its destiny. Above all, Foner concludes, the Republican was an antislavery party. By emphasizing the idealism as well as the self-interest of Republicanism, and by insisting on the secondary importance of nativism and race prejudice in forging the new party, Foner bravely-and persuasively bucks the current trend among political historians. Given the breadth of his study, his generalizations necessarily admit of exceptions, and some may wish to challenge his close identification of political rhetoric and mass belief. Guilt and resentment a northern complicity in the slave system may also have activated Republicans more than the author discerns. Yet this analysis of the Republican ideology and its consequences is as perceptive as it is provocative and advances immeasurably our understanding of the northern mind on the eve of the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison (December 12, 1805 - May 24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded with Isaac Knapp in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement.