Author: Mark Wahlgren SummersPublisher: Littlefield History of the Civ
ISBN: 9781469664071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
Book Description
Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction
The Ordeal of the Reunion
Author: Mark Wahlgren SummersPublisher: Littlefield History of the Civ
ISBN: 9781469664071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
Book Description
Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction
The Ordeal of the Reunion
Author: Mark Wahlgren SummersPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469617579
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
Book Description
"For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently enslaved for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction's need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. This book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction's demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors' aims in 1865 were met--and at what cost"--
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
Author: Bernard BailynPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674641617
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 468
Book Description
The paradoxical and tragic story of America's most prominent Loyalist - a man caught between king and country.
The Cacophony of Politics
Author: J. Matthew GallmanPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 565
Book Description
The Cacophony of Politics charts the trajectory of the Democratic Party as the party of opposition in the North during the Civil War. A comprehensive overview, this book reveals the myriad complications and contingencies of political life in the Northern states and explains the objectives of the nearly half of eligible Northern voters who cast a ballot against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. The party’s famous slogan "The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is" was meant to have broad appeal and promote solidarity among Northern Democrats by invoking their core ideological commitments to nationalism, law and order, tradition, and strict construction. But, as J. Matthew Gallman shows, the slogan was a poor reflection of the volatile, fluid, messy, and improvisational reality of political life for men and women, across the public and private spheres. Democrats experienced the war as a cascading series of dilemmas, for which their slogan did not always offer guidance or resolution. Offering a definitive account of the Democratic Party in the North, The Cacophony of Politics shows the limits of ideology and the ways the Civil War—and the nature of nineteenth-century political culture—confounded the Democrats’ self-image and exacerbated their divisions, especially over the central issue of slavery. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era
The Era of Good Stealings
Author: Mark Wahlgren SummersPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Political corruption
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
In his first book, The Plundering Generation, Mark Wahlgren Summers dealt with corruption and the breakdown of ethics in public life from 1849 to 1861. Continuing his look at the post-Civil War years he examines the effects of the war on public ethics, raising important questions about the significance of corruption for policymaking and American political thought during the years 1865 to 1877. Who, thinking of Reconstruction fails to think of corruption? The Grant administration and the Great Barbecue remain inseparable in our minds. From grafting South Carolina Republicans to plundering Tammany Hall delegates, abuses of the public trust were all the fashion. Noting the effect of corruption on national politics, during the era of Reconstruction, Summers nonetheless suggests the corruption issue may have had more important consequences than the misdeeds themselves. Indeed, the very forces that impelled corruption were the ones that defined and limited the character of reform. Official rascality raised the strongest possible argument for a scaled-down, cheap government, a professional civil service, and a retreat from Reconstruction. Without whitewashing villainy or blackguarding the liberal reformers, Summers re-examines the swindles, exposes the exaggerations and the self-interested motives of the accusers, and suggests ways in which the issue itself struck heavier blows at the way Americans governed themselves than did the acts of corruption.
Reconstruction beyond 150
Author: Orville Vernon BurtonPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813949874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 479
Book Description
No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period. Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.
Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty
Author: Mark A. GraberPublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635033
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414
Book Description
In contemporary constitutional politics, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment—which includes the citizenship, privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection clauses—is the star of the show. But this was not the focus for the Republican members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress. Their interest was instead in Sections 2, 3, and 4. Today we tend to think the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect persons of color. But the Republicans engaged in Reconstruction saw its purpose as preventing “rebel rule” by punishing treason and rewarding loyalty, particularly the loyalty of white men who remained faithful to the Union during the Civil War. In this first of three planned volumes for the University Press of Kansas’s Constitutional Thinking series, Mark A. Graber aims to restore to contemporary memory the Fourteenth Amendment drafted by those Republican and Unionist members of Congress who supported congressional reconstruction. In Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty, Graber breaks new ground researching Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment, and constitutionalism by highlighting the importance of Sections 2, 3, and 4 to the representatives in the Thirty-Ninth Congress and their relative indifference to Section 1. His work underscores the importance and impact that legislative primacy and partisan supremacy had to Republican constitutional thinking about constitutional authority immediately after the Civil War. Centered on Reconstruction and constitutional reform, Graber shows anew the Republican effort to prevent rebel rule by empowering and protecting loyalty.
Armies of Deliverance
Author: Elizabeth R. VaronPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190860618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies built the case that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit the North and South alike. The theme of deliverance was essential in mobilizing a Unionist coalition of Northerners and anti-Confederate Southerners. Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, were determined to preempt, discredit, and silence Yankee appeals to the Southern masses. In their quest for political unity Confederates relentlessly played up two themes: Northern barbarity and Southern victimization. Casting the Union army as ruthless conquerors, Confederates argued that the emancipation of blacks was synonymous with the subjugation of the white South. Interweaving military and social history, Varon shows that everyday acts on the ground--from the flight of slaves, to protests against the draft, the plundering of civilian homes, and civilian defiance of military occupation--reverberated at the highest levels of government. Varon also offers new perspectives on major battles, illuminating how soldiers and civilians alike coped with the physical and emotional toll of the war as it grew into a massive humanitarian crisis. The Union's politics of deliverance helped it to win the war. But such appeals failed to convince Confederates to accept peace on the victor's terms, ultimately sowing the seeds of postwar discord. Armies of Deliverance offers innovative insights on the conflict for those steeped in Civil War history and novices alike.
Reconstruction and Empire
Author: David PriorPublisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823298663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524
Book Description
This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.
Salmon P. Chase
Author: Walter StahrPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501199250
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 848
Book Description
An NPR Best Book of 2022 From an acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer, an “eloquently written, impeccably researched, and intensely moving” (The Wall Street Journal) reassessment of Abraham Lincoln’s indispensable Secretary of the Treasury: a leading proponent for black rights during his years in cabinet and later as Chief Justice of the United States. Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes. Tapped by Lincoln to become Secretary of the Treasury, Chase would soon prove vital to the Civil War effort, raising the billions of dollars that allowed the Union to win the war while also pressing the president to recognize black rights. When Lincoln had the chance to appoint a chief justice in 1864, he chose his faithful rival because he was sure Chase would make the right decisions on the difficult racial, political, and economic issues the Supreme Court would confront during Reconstruction. Drawing on previously overlooked sources, Walter Stahr offers a “revelatory” (The Christian Science Monitor) new look at the pivotal events of the Civil War and its aftermath, and a “superb” (James McPherson), “magisterial” (Amanda Foreman) account of a complex forgotten man at the center of the fight for racial justice in 19th century America.
