Author: Benjamin Franklin Cooling (III)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The military during constitutional crisis, the secession winter
Author: The New American State Papers, Military Affairs: The military during constitutional crisis, the secession winter
Author: Benjamin Franklin Cooling (III)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The New American State Papers, Military Affairs
Author: Benjamin Franklin CoolingPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Secession Winter
Author: Robert J CookPublisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 142140897X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Three historians examine what drove southern secession in the winter of 1860-1861 and why it culminated in the American Civil War. Politicians and opinion leaders on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line struggled to formulate coherent responses to the secession of the deep South states. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861 triggered civil war and the loss of four upper South states from the Union. The essays by three senior historians in Secession Winter explore the robust debates that preceded these events. For five months in the winter of 1860–1861, Americans did not know for certain that civil war was upon them. Some hoped for a compromise; others wanted a fight. Many struggled to understand what was happening to their country. Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon take approaches to this period that combine political, economic, and social-cultural lines of analysis. Rather than focus on whether civil war was inevitable, they look at the political process of secession and find multiple internal divisions—political parties, whites and nonwhites, elites and masses, men and women. Even individual northerners and southerners suffered inner conflicts. The authors include the voices of Unionists and Whig party moderates who had much to lose and upcountry folk who owned no slaves and did not particularly like those who did. Barney contends that white southerners were driven to secede by anxiety and guilt over slavery. Varon takes a new look at Robert E. Lee’s decision to join the Confederacy. Cook argues that both northern and southern politicians claimed the rightness of their cause by constructing selective narratives of historical grievances.
The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War
Author: Michael F. ConlinPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Demonstrates the crucial role that the Constitution played in the coming of the Civil War.
The New American State Papers, Military Affairs: Policy and strategy of national defense
Author: Benjamin Franklin Cooling (III)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Book Description
West Pointers and the Civil War
Author: Wayne Wei-siang HsiehPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Most Civil War generals were graduates of West Point, and many of them helped transform the U.S. Army from what was little better than an armed mob that performed poorly during the War of 1812 into the competent fighting force that won the Mexican War. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh demonstrates how the "old army" transformed itself into a professional military force after 1814, and, more important, how "old army" methods profoundly shaped the conduct of the Civil War.
The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876
Author: Louise A. Arnold-FriendPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 724
Book Description
And the War Came
Author: Kenneth Milton StamppPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Lincoln President-Elect
Author: Harold HolzerPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141659440X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 643
Book Description
One of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union, examines the four months between Lincoln's election and inauguration, when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency—there would be no compromise on slavery or secession of the slaveholding states, even at the cost of civil war. Abraham Lincoln first demonstrated his determination and leadership in the Great Secession Winter—the four months between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861—when he rejected compromises urged on him by Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, that might have preserved the Union a little longer but would have enshrined slavery for generations. Though Lincoln has been criticized by many historians for failing to appreciate the severity of the secession crisis that greeted his victory, Harold Holzer shows that the presidentelect waged a shrewd and complex campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery while vainly trying to limit secession to a few Deep South states. During this most dangerous White House transition in American history, the country had two presidents: one powerless (the president-elect, possessing no constitutional authority), the other paralyzed (the incumbent who refused to act). Through limited, brilliantly timed and crafted public statements, determined private letters, tough political pressure, and personal persuasion, Lincoln guaranteed the integrity of the American political process of majority rule, sounded the death knell of slavery, and transformed not only his own image but that of the presidency, even while making inevitable the war that would be necessary to make these achievements permanent. Lincoln President-Elect is the first book to concentrate on Lincoln's public stance and private agony during these months and on the momentous consequences when he first demonstrated his determination and leadership. Holzer recasts Lincoln from an isolated prairie politician yet to establish his greatness, to a skillful shaper of men and opinion and an immovable friend of freedom at a decisive moment when allegiance to the founding credo "all men are created equal" might well have been sacrificed.