As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.
Gibson suggested that the messenger give these instructions to Colonel Hoffman , who was the ranking officer of the brigade , but the courier insisted that there just was not enough time for such niceties of protocol .
In this groundbreaking and highly praised book, McClintock follows the decision-making process from bitter partisan rancor to consensus.
Lewis's memo, Russell wrote after he had finished studying the missive from America, had misrepresented his views. Russell denied having made an actual interventionist proposal and insisted that he would never take such action without a ...
Taken together, these essays revise and enhance existing work on the battle, highlighting ways in which the military and nonmilitary spheres of war intersected in the Wilderness.
While the Civil War is famous for epic battles involving massive armies engaged in conventional warfare, A Savage Conflict is the first work to treat guerrilla warfare as critical to understanding the course and outcome of the Civil War.
The purpose of this study was to discover what was typical in the history and character of the state during the period of the Civil War and the readjustment that...
Charles J. Mitchell to Jefferson Davis, June 7, 1862, Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 8: 1862, Linda Lasswell Crist, ed. ... Chase to Thomas J. Durant, December 28, 1863, Dodson, Diary and Correspondence 230. See also Joseph G. Tregle, ...
19. J. H. Moore, “Longstreet's Assault,” Philadelphia Weekly Times, November 4, 1882; reprinted as “Heth's Division at Gettysburg.” Southern Bivouac (May 1885): 383-95, and as “The Battle of Gettysburg,” in John Berrien Lindsley, ...
Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and ...
Comprised of essays from twelve leading scholars, this volume extends the discussion of Civil War controversies far past the death of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865.