Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832-1861 PDF Download

Author: Jonathan M. Atkins
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

View

Book Description
In this thought-provoking study, Jonathan M. Atkins provides a fresh look at the partisan ideological battles that marked the political culture of antebellum Tennessee. He argues that the legacy of party politics was a key factor in shaping Tennessee's hesitant course during the crisis of Union in 1860-61. No previous book has so clearly detailed the role of party politics and ideology in Tennessee's early history. As Atkins shows, the ideological debate helps to explain not only the character and survival of Tennessee's party system but also the persistent strength of unionism in a state that ultimately joined the Southern cause.

Author: Dwight Pitcaithley
Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781621906827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
The election of 1860 put to rest a tumultuous decade of legislative contest over the institution of slavery--even as it set in motion events that led directly to its demise by civil war. While some scholarship tends to minimize the role of slavery in the secession of the Southern states in the early 1860s, Dwight Pitcaithley's Tennessee Secedes: A Documentary History takes the opposite approach, examining the many factors that both fueled and complicated Tennessee's unique journey toward secession in 1861. Organized chronologically by source and speaker, Tennessee Secedes presents a selection of primary sources from December 1860 through the summer of 1861, inviting students to examine the arc of Tennessee's secession march. Pitcaithley introduces proclamations, declarations, addresses, resolutions, proposed constitutional amendments, and other materials from Tennessee legislators, members of Congress, and delegates to the East Tennessee Convention. These sources highlight the political divisions apparent in the Volunteer State during this season of unrest. While many other Southern states saw little support for Unionism in the early 1860s, Tennessee stood in stark contrast, with a large and vocal population that ardently opposed secession. Complete with appendices featuring 1861 election returns, communications from the Tennessee Congressional Delegation of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, and a timeline for Secession Winter--as well as questions for further discussion--Tennessee Secedes is an invaluable resource for students of the Civil War and Tennessee history, offering an insightful analysis of Tennessee's uncertain path to the Confederacy in the summer of 1861.

Author: John W. Quist
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813045037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

View

Book Description
As James Buchanan took office in 1857, the United States found itself at a crossroads. Dissolution of the Union had been averted and the Democratic Party maintained control of the federal government, but the nation watched to see if Pennsylvania's first president could make good on his promise to calm sectional tensions. Despite Buchanan's central role in a crucial hour in U.S. history, few presidents have been more ignored by historians. In assembling the essays for this volume, Michael Birkner and John Quist have asked leading scholars to reconsider whether Buchanan’s failures stemmed from his own mistakes or from circumstances that no president could have overcome. Buchanan's dealings with Utah shed light on his handling of the secession crisis. His approach to Dred Scott reinforces the image of a president whose doughface views were less a matter of hypocrisy than a thorough identification with southern interests. Essays on the secession crisis provide fodder for debate about the strengths and limitations of presidential authority in an existential moment for the young nation. Although the essays in this collection offer widely differing interpretations of Buchanan's presidency, they all grapple honestly with the complexities of the issues faced by the man who sat in the White House prior to the towering figure of Lincoln, and contribute to a deeper understanding of a turbulent and formative era.

Author: Robert Tracy McKenzie
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195182944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

View

Book Description
This text presents the story of the Civil War in Knoxville, Tennessee - a perpetually occupied, bitterly divided southern town. It documents the loyalties of more than half of the townspeople, identifies complex patterns of individual decisions, and explores the agonizing personal decisions that the war made inescapable.

Author: William L. Barney
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190076089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

View

Book Description
A comprehensive study of secession in all fifteen slave states, Rebels in the Making is a political, social, and economic history of the late antebellum South that examines the appeal of secession to a variety of actors in these states and reveals it to be not a mass democratic movement but a revolution led from above.

Author: Marius M. Carriere Jr.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496816854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
In the 1850s, a startling new political party appeared on the American scene. Both its members and its critics called the new party by various names, but to most it was known as the Know Nothing Party. It reignited political fires over nativism and anti-immigration sentiments. At a time of political uncertainty, with the Whig party on the verge of collapse, the Know Nothings seemed destined to replace them and perhaps become a political fixture. Historian Marius M. Carriere Jr. tracks the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement in Louisiana, outlining not only the history of the party as it is usually known, but also explaining how the party's unique permeation in Louisiana contrasted with the Know Nothings' expansion nationally and elsewhere in the South. For example, many Roman Catholics in the state joined the Know Nothings, even though the party was nationally known as anti-Catholic. While historians have largely concentrated on the Know Nothings' success in the North, Carriere furnishes a new context for the evolution of a national political movement at odds with its Louisiana constituents. Through statistics on various elections and demographics of Louisiana politicians, Carriere forms a detailed account of Louisiana's Know Nothing Party. The national and rapidly changing Louisiana political landscape yielded surprising, credible leverage for the Know Nothing movement. Slavery, Carriere argues, also played a crucial difference between southern and northern Know Nothing ideals. Carriere delineates the eventual downfall of the Know Nothing Party, while offering new perspectives on a nativist movement, which has appeared once again in a changing, divided country.

Author: Manisha Sinha
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

View

Book Description
In this comprehensive analysis of politics and ideology in antebellum South Carolina, Manisha Sinha offers a provocative new look at the roots of southern separatism and the causes of the Civil War. Challenging works that portray secession as a fight for white liberty, she argues instead that it was a conservative, antidemocratic movement to protect and perpetuate racial slavery. Sinha discusses some of the major sectional crises of the antebellum era--including nullification, the conflict over the expansion of slavery into western territories, and secession--and offers an important reevaluation of the movement to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s. In the process she reveals the central role played by South Carolina planter politicians in developing proslavery ideology and the use of states' rights and constitutional theory for the defense of slavery. Sinha's work underscores the necessity of integrating the history of slavery with the traditional narrative of southern politics. Only by taking into account the political importance of slavery, she insists, can we arrive at a complete understanding of southern politics and the enormity of the issues confronting both northerners and southerners on the eve of the Civil War.

Author: Gary W. Gallagher
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

View

Book Description
This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians. In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders--those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction. The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior, A Political Nation underscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics. Contributors: Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College - William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University - Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey - William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities - Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia - Sean Nalty, University of Virginia - Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University - Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University - Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University - J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Author: John M. Sacher
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080713242X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
Though antebellum Louisiana shared the rest of the South's commitment to slavery and cotton, the presence of a substantial sugarcane industry, large Creole and Catholic populations, numerous foreign and northern immigrants, and the immense city of New Orleans made it perhaps the most unsouthern of southern states. John M. Sacher's A Perfect War of Politics explores why Louisiana joined its neighbors in seceding from the Union in early 1861 and offers the first comprehensive study of the state's antebellum political parties and their interaction with the electorate. Sacher shows that, although civic participation expanded beyond the elite from 1824 to 1861, Louisiana remained a "white men's democracy." Ultimately, he explains, an obsession with defending white men's liberty led Louisiana's politicians to support secession. Sacher's welcome study provides a fresh, grass-roots perspective on the political causes of the Civil War and confirms the dominant role regional politics played in antebellum Louisiana.

Author: Gerald Leonard
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861316
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

View

Book Description
This ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party. Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation, Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-century political assumptions but draw on eighteenth-century constitutional theory to justify a party division between "the democracy" and "the aristocracy." Illinois is no longer a frontier latecomer to democratic party organization but a laboratory in which politicians use Van Buren's version of the Constitution, states' rights, and popular sovereignty to reeducate a people who had traditionally opposed party organization. The modern two-party system is no longer firmly in place by 1840. Instead, the system remains captive to the constitutional commitments on which the Democrats and Whigs founded themselves, even as the specter of sectional crisis haunts the parties' constitutional visions.