Author: John Bicknell Publisher: Chicago Review Press ISBN: 1613738005 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. Amid all the violence, the campaign of the new Republican Party, headed by famed explorer John C. Frémont, offered a ray of hope that had never before been seen in the politics of the nation—a major party dedicated to limiting the spread of slavery. For the first time, women and African Americans became actively engaged in a presidential contest, and the candidate's wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, played a central role in both planning and executing strategy while being a public face of the campaign. The 1856 campaign was also run against the backdrop of a country on the move, with settlers continuing to spread westward facing unimagined horrors, a terrible natural disaster that took hundreds of lives in the South, and one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history, which set the stage for the Civil War. Frémont lost, but his strong showing in the North proved that a sectional party could win a national election, blazing the trail for Abraham Lincoln's victory four years later.
Author: Steve Inskeep Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735224374 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 490
Book Description
Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
Author: Michael F. Holt Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700624872 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Because of its extraordinary consequences and because of Abraham Lincoln's place in the American pantheon, the presidential election of 1860 is probably the most studied in our history. But perhaps for the same reasons, historians have focused on the contest of Lincoln versus Stephen Douglas in the northern free states and John Bell versus John C. Breckinridge in the slaveholding South. In The Election of 1860 a preeminent scholar of American history disrupts this familiar narrative with a clearer and more comprehensive account of how the election unfolded and what it was actually about. Most critically, the book counters the common interpretation of the election as a referendum on slavery and the Republican Party's purported threat to it. However significantly slavery figured in the election, The Election of 1860 reveals the key importance of widespread opposition to the Republican Party because of its overtly anti-southern rhetoric and seemingly unstoppable rise to power in the North after its emergence in 1854. Also of critical importance was the corruption of the incumbent administration of Democrat James Buchanan—and a nationwide revulsion against party. Grounding his history in a nuanced retelling of the pre-1860 story, Michael F. Holt explores the sectional politics that permeated the election and foreshadowed the coming Civil War. He brings to light how the campaigns of the Republican Party and the National (Northern) Democrats and the Constitutional (Southern) Democrats and the newly formed Constitutional Union Party were not exclusively regional. His attention to the little-studied role of the Buchanan Administration, and of perceived threats to the preservation of the Union, clarifies the true dynamic of the 1860 presidential election, particularly in its early stages.
Author: Sidney Blumenthal Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501153781 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 608
Book Description
Explores how the sixteenth president rebounded from the disintegration of the Whig Party and took on the anti-Immigration party in Illinois to clear a path for a new Republican Party.
Author: Candan Badem Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004182055 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
This book analyzes the Crimean War from the Ottoman perspective based mainly on Ottoman and Russian primary sources, and includes an assessment of the War s impact on the Ottoman state and Ottoman society.
Author: Sidney Blumenthal Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476777314 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 784
Book Description
Lincoln’s incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed in this “compelling, original, and elegantly written” (Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author) third volume of the “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review) Political Life of Abraham Lincoln series, following A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel. After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party’s nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political savvy and determination. This is Abraham Lincoln, who indisputably becomes the greatest president and moral leader in the nation’s history. But he must first build a new political party, brilliantly state the anti-slavery case and overcome shattering defeat to win the presidency. In the years of civil war to follow, he will show mightily that the nation was right to bet on him. He was its preserver, a politician of moral integrity. All the Powers of Earth is “as essential as any political biography is likely to be” and Sidney Bluementhal is “the definitive chronicler of Lincoln’s political career” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Author: Michael Hinton Publisher: From Musket to Maxim 1815-1914 ISBN: 9781911628316 Category : Health & Fitness Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Detailed analyses of primary documents associated with the medical aspects of the Crimean campaign indicate that the catastrophic collapse in the health of the British Army during the winter of 1854/55 was followed by a gradual improvement starting early in the New Year. This was not the result any major advances in medical science. Mainly, this wa
Author: Michael F. Holt Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199830894 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1298
Book Description
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: John Bicknell
Author: Steve Inskeep
Author: Michael F. Holt
Author: William Eugene Gienapp
Author: Sidney Blumenthal
Author: Candan Badem
Author: Sidney Blumenthal
Author: Michael Hinton
Author: Michael F. Holt
Author: William Walker