Legacy of Disunion

Legacy of Disunion PDF

Author: Susan Mary Grant

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2003-03-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780807128473

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The conviction that the American Civil War left a massive legacy to the country has generally been much clearer than the definition of what that legacy is. Did the war, as Ulysses S. Grant believed, bequeath power, intelligence, and sectional harmony to America, or did it, as many have argued since, sow racial and regional bitterness that has blighted the nation since 1865? What, exactly, was the legacy of disunion? This collection explores that question from a variety of angles, showcasing the work of twelve scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom. The essays ponder the role of history, myth, and media in sustaining the memory of the war and its racial implications in the South; Abraham Lincoln’s legacy; and the war’s consequences in less studied areas, such as civil-military relations, constitutional and legal history, and America’s ascent on the international stage. By juxtaposing American and non-American interpretations, this stimulating volume sheds light on aspects of the war’s legacy that from a purely American viewpoint are sometimes too close for comfort. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Civil War is its ongoing debate and continuing fascination worldwide.

Disunion!

Disunion! PDF

Author: Elizabeth R. Varon

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780807887189

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In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.

Apostles of Disunion

Apostles of Disunion PDF

Author: Charles B. Dew

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 126

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.

The Legacy of the Civil War

The Legacy of the Civil War PDF

Author: Robert Penn Warren

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-11

Total Pages: 83

ISBN-13: 0803299273

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In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation."

Slavery and the American West

Slavery and the American West PDF

Author: Michael A. Morrison

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0807864323

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Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

Apostles of Disunion

Apostles of Disunion PDF

Author: Charles B. Dew

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 0813920361

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In the inflammatory rhetoric of state-appointed commissioners dispatched to preach the secessionist cause, Charles Dew finds what he maintains are the true causes of the Civil War and its legacy of racism in contemporary America.

Lincoln's Enduring Legacy

Lincoln's Enduring Legacy PDF

Author: William D. Pederson

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010-12-16

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0739149911

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This collection of highly readable and accessible essays on Lincoln's legacy offers a wide array of perspectives on the enduring impact of the nation's greatest president on leaders, thinkers, and American history. The book explores how Lincoln's words and deeds have influenced the pursuit of justice and freedom and the practice of democracy in the century and a half since he governed.

Armies of Deliverance

Armies of Deliverance PDF

Author: Elizabeth R. Varon

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 019086060X

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Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Lincoln's Union coalition sought to deliver the South from slaveholder tyranny and deliver to it the blessings of modern civilization. Over the course of the war, supporters of black freedom built the case that slavery was the obstacle to national reunion and that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit Northern and Southern whites alike. To sustain their morale, Northerners played up evidence of white Southern Unionism, of antislavery progress in the slaveholding border states, and of disaffection among Confederates. But the Union's emphasis on Southern deliverance served, ironically, not only to galvanize loyal Amer icans but also to galvanize disloyal ones. Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, scorned the Northern promise of liberation and argued that the emancipation of blacks was synonymous with the subjugation of the white South.

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-01-06

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0375703837

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.