One Nation Divided by Slavery
One Nation Divided by Slavery

Author: Michael F. Conlin

Publisher: American Abolitionism and Anti

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781606352403

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The centrality of the American Revolution in the antebellum slavery controversy In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in "history wars" every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles, revealing much about their contrasting views of American nationalism. While antebellum Americans agreed on many elements of national identity--in particular that their republic was the special abode of liberty on earth--they disagreed on the role of slavery. The historic truths that many of the founders were slaveholders who had doubts about the morality of slavery, and that all thirteen original states practiced slavery to some extent in 1776, offered plenty of ambiguity for Americans to "remember" selectively. Fire-Eaters defended Jefferson, Washington, and other leading patriots as paternalistic slaveholders, if not "positive good" apologists for the institution, who founded a slaveholding republic. In contrast, abolitionists cited the same slaveholders as opponents of bondage, who took steps to end slavery and establish a free republic. Moderates in the North and the South took solace in the fact that the North had managed to end slavery in its own way through gradual emancipation while allowing the South to continue to practice slavery. They believed that the founders had established a nation that balanced free and slave labor. Because the American Revolution and the American Civil War were pivotal and crucial elements in shaping the United States, the intertwined themes in One Nation Divided By Slavery provide a new lens through which to view American history and national identity.

A House Divided
A House Divided

Author: Ben McNitt

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 0811769747

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Slavery is one of the central, most enduringly significant facts of U.S. history. It loomed like a dark cloud over the country’s birth at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and shaped the most important nodes of American history before the Civil War. Even today, the country continues to debate its past as it relates to slavery, and the political and geographic contours of human bondage endure into the twenty-first century. In a deeply researched, wide-ranging book, retired journalist Ben McNitt tells the story of how slavery shaped American politics—and indeed the American story—from the Founding until the Civil War. McNitt’s sharp narrative covers people and events that still resonate: Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Brown and Harpers Ferry, fire-eating secessionists, and the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. No other single work covers this topic as comprehensively and accessibly.

American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850

Author: Alan Taylor

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1324005807

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Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

Apostles of Disunion
Apostles of Disunion

Author: Charles B. Dew

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0813939453

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Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

Marching Masters
Marching Masters

Author: Colin Edward Woodward

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-03-05

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0813935423

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The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders themselves, but they were products of the largest and most prosperous slaveholding civilization the world had ever seen, and they sought to maintain clear divisions between black and white, master and servant, free and slave. In Marching Masters Colin Woodward explores not only the importance of slavery in the minds of Confederate soldiers but also its effects on military policy and decision making. Beyond showing how essential the defense of slavery was in motivating Confederate troops to fight, Woodward examines the Rebels’ persistent belief in the need to defend slavery and deploy it militarily as the war raged on. Slavery proved essential to the Confederate war machine, and Rebels strove to protect it just as they did Southern cities, towns, and railroads. Slaves served by the tens of thousands in the Southern armies—never as soldiers, but as menial laborers who cooked meals, washed horses, and dug ditches. By following Rebel troops' continued adherence to notions of white supremacy into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the book carries the story beyond the Confederacy’s surrender. Drawing upon hundreds of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, Marching Masters combines the latest social and military history in its compelling examination of the last bloody years of slavery in the United States.

A House Divided
A House Divided

Author: Patience Essah

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780813916811

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Delaware stood outside the primary streams of New World emancipation. Despite slavery's virtual demise in that state during the antebellum years and Delaware's staunch Unionism during the Civil War itself, the state failed to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits slavery, until 1901. Patience Essah takes the reader of A House Divided through the introduction, evolution, demise, and final abolition of slavery in Delaware. In unraveling the enigma of how and why tiny Delaware abstained from the abolition mandated in northern states after the American Revolution, resisted the movement toward abolition in border states during the Civil War, and stubbornly opposed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, she offers fresh insight into the history of slavery, race, and racialism in America. The citizens of Delaware voluntarily freed over 90 percent of their slaves, yet they declined Lincoln's 1862 offer of compensation for emancipation, and the legislature persistently foiled all attempts to mandate emancipation. Those arguing against emancipation expressed fears that it inadvertently would alter the delicate balance of political power in the state. What Essah has found at the base of the Delaware paradox is a political discourse stalemated by instrumental appeals to racialism. In showing the persistence of slavery in Delaware, she raises questions about postslavery race relations. Her analysis is vital to an understanding of the African-American experience.

A Nation Divided
A Nation Divided

Author: Joseph Adler

Publisher:

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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During my forty-eight years of teaching United States History, there were several myths that students had heard about Abraham Lincoln, African Slaves and the Civil War. When we began studying the unit on these topics and Abraham Lincoln's name was mentioned in discussion, in almost every class I taught students would say, "I heard that Lincoln owned slaves." Then students would tell me they learned in classes they took that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. And some students would point out there are superior races of people and inferior races of people, and that the inferior races are only fit for doing menial jobs. I started teaching in 1958, and I am writing this book in 2023 when I am 90 years old. The community where I started teaching was a suburban area of Los Angeles and teachers would tell me that until recently black people "knew" they were not permitted in the streets at night. I decided to write this book to set the record straight, because many of these attitudes still permeate our culture: - Lincoln was not a slave owner. - Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. - There are not superior and inferior races of people. I know you will enjoy reading and learning about the truth of the historical background of these topics. I taught United States History in a special and unique way. In my classes I would bring my guitar each session and sing at least one song that the people used to sing during the time period being discussed in class. To make this book more meaningful, and show how one important aspect of human experience, music can be integrated into an historical analysis. There will be songs that the slaves sang and songs that the soldiers sang. This will add a dimension to understand the historical events that most histories do not. I recorded these songs so you may, if you wish, join with me as I sing the melodies of the songs. The recordings are included as links within this book. I did not put in all the words to these songs because I did not intend the reader to see this as a songbook. It is an historical analysis, which includes songs. I hope you will enjoy this approach as my students did.

The War Before the War
The War Before the War

Author: Andrew Delbanco

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0735224137

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A New York Times Notable Book Selection Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Lionel Trilling Book Award A New York Times Critics' Best Book "Excellent... stunning."—Ta-Nehisi Coates This book tells the story of America’s original sin—slavery—through politics, law, literature, and above all, through the eyes of enslavedblack people who risked their lives to flee from bondage, thereby forcing the nation to confront the truth about itself. The struggle over slavery divided not only the American nation but also the hearts and minds of individual citizens faced with the timeless problem of when to submit to unjust laws and when to resist. The War Before the War illuminates what brought us to war with ourselves and the terrible legacies of slavery that are with us still.

Storms Gather
Storms Gather

Author: Robert Marcum

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9781621081821

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Randolf and Elizabeth Hudson were barely into their teens when they left the persecuted city of Nauvoo with their mother, Mary, and relocated to booming St. Louis. Years later, under the gathering clouds of civil war, Rand fights to keep the family's steamship business from a hypocritical uncle who has sold out to treacherous slaveholders and secessionists while Elizabeth struggles to end an ill-suited entanglement that could cripple her freedom --

A Nation Divided
A Nation Divided

Author: Mark Thomas

Publisher: Townsend Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 1591943736

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"A house divided against itself cannot stand." When Abraham Lincoln spoke these words in 1858, a deadly storm was brewing in the United States. Many in the South no longer wanted to remain a part of the country. They wanted to form their own country, where slavery remained legal and where Northerners stayed out of Southerners' business. In 1861, the storm hit. The "house" of the United States was split in half by a terrible war that would drag on for years. Before the Civil War ended, more than half a million soldiers would die in what would be, and still remains, the conflict that has claimed the greatest number of American lives. But when the clouds of this war of brother against brother finally cleared, nearly four million African Americans had been freed from bondage--and the divided house was whole again.