Andrew Stevenson, Democrat and Diplomat, 1785-1857

Andrew Stevenson, Democrat and Diplomat, 1785-1857 PDF Author: Francis Fry Wayland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Andrew Stevenson, Democrat and Diplomat, 1785-1857

Andrew Stevenson, Democrat and Diplomat, 1785-1857 PDF Author: Francis Fry Wayland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description


Andrew Stevenson

Andrew Stevenson PDF Author: Francis Fry Wayland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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The Papers of Henry Clay

The Papers of Henry Clay PDF Author: Henry Clay
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813130514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 996

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Book Description
The Papers of Henry Clay span the crucial first half of the nineteenth century in American history. Few men in his time were so intimately concerned with the formation of national policy, and few influenced so profoundly the growth of American political institutions. The year 1837 found Henry Clay hard at work in a successful effort to organize and strengthen the new Whig party. In his attempt to provide for it an ideological core, he emphasized restoration of the Bank of the United States, distribution of the treasury surplus to the states, continued adherence to his Compromise Tariff Act of 1833, and federal funding of internal improvements. The achievement of these goals, Clay reasoned, would mitigate the severe impact of the Depression of 1837 and sweep the Whigs into the White House in 1840. Soon after the election of 1836, Clay began running again for the presidency. By 1838 it was clear to him that he would have to come to grips politically with the long-muted slavery question. This he did in February 1839 in a Senate speech that was so proslavery, anti-abolitionist, and racially extremist that it cost him the Whig presidential nomination at the Harrisburg convention in December 1839. William Henry Harrison was nominated in his stead and won handily. But one month after his inauguration Harrison died and Vice President John Tyler, a states' rights Democrat turned Whig, was elevated to the presidency. Senator Clay emerged from his disappointment at Harrisburg as the acknowledged leader of the Whig party and further unified it in a wide-ranging assault on the Tyler administration's refusal to support Whig principles. By the end of 1843 Tyler had been broken, the Whig party was Clay's to lead, and the Kentuckian was again in the presidential lists. Confident that 1844 would surely be his year, Clay unfortunately failed to see the formation and growth of the black cloud that was Texas annexation. Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

The Slaveholding Republic

The Slaveholding Republic PDF Author: the late Don E. Fehrenbacher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198032472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Many leading historians have argued that the Constitution of the United States was a proslavery document. But in The Slaveholding Republic, one of America's most eminent historians refutes this claim in a landmark history that stretches from the Continental Congress to the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Fehrenbacher shows that the Constitution itself was more or less neutral on the issue of slavery and that, in the antebellum period, the idea that the Constitution protected slavery was hotly debated (many Northerners would concede only that slavery was protected by state law, not by federal law). Nevertheless, he also reveals that U.S. policy abroad and in the territories was consistently proslavery. Fehrenbacher makes clear why Lincoln's election was such a shock to the South and shows how Lincoln's approach to emancipation, which seems exceedingly cautious by modern standards, quickly evolved into a "Republican revolution" that ended the anomaly of the United States as a "slaveholding republic."

The Presidency of Martin Van Buren

The Presidency of Martin Van Buren PDF Author: Major L. Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States, has been judged harshly by some historians as a politician by trade and a spoilsman without principles, a "little magician" who was interested only in his own advancement. This volume provides a thorough recounting of the events and decisions of Van Buren's White House years (1837-1841), and adds to the positive reappraisal of Van Buren as an able statesman and effective chief executive. Wilson stresses that Van Buren faced the major problems of his presidency with courage and consistency, and that he brought repose to a nation wrenched both by sectional differences and by the violent fluctuations of economic expansion and contraction. Wilson discusses Van Buren's close relationship with Andrew Jackson and substantially qualifies the persistent interpretation of the Van Buren presidency as the "third term" of Jackson. Van Buren, a pragmatic Jeffersonian with a statesmanlike concern for order, reversed Jackson's priorities. Wilson describes how Van Buren resolved the crisis with Mexico and succeeded in keeping peace with Britain at a time when incidents arising out of rebellion in Canada and the disputed Maine boundary might have precipitated war. The most distinctive contribution of this volume is its in-depth analysis of the economic and political aspects of Van Buren's domestic policy, especialy the Independent Treasury, the issue that gave basic shape to his entire presidency. Jackson had divorced the Treasury from the national bank; Van Buren took one further step and rendered the operations of the Treasury independent of the state banks as well. By the end of his term, debate on the issues of currency and enterprise had brought the second-party system in the U.S. to maturity. In 1840 Van Buren's views in this area would cost him reelection. This study sheds lights on a turbulent period in American history and contributes to our understanding of Martin Van Buren's achievements. He kept the nation out of war, reduced sectional tensions, and established the basis for a fiscal policy which he believed would bring greater stability to economic development.

The Petticoat Affair

The Petticoat Affair PDF Author: John F. Marszalek
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807155772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In The Petticoat Affair, prize-winning historian John F. Marszalek offers the first in--depth investigation of the earliest -- and perhaps greatest -- political sex scandal in American history. During Andrew Jackson's first term in office, Margaret Eaton, the wife of Secretary of State John Henry Eaton, was branded a "loose woman" for her unconventional public life. The brash, outgoing, and beautiful daughter of a Washington innkeeper, Margaret had socialized with her father's guests and married Eaton very soon after the death of her first husband, shocking genteel society. Jackson saw attacks on Eaton as part of a conspiracy to topple his administration, and his strong defense of her character dominated the first two years of his term, and led to the resignation of his entire cabinet.

Slavery and the American West

Slavery and the American West PDF Author: Michael A. Morrison
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
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.

Partisans of the Southern Press

Partisans of the Southern Press PDF Author: Carl R. Osthaus
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813161401
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Carl R. Osthaus examines the southern contribution to American Press history, from Thomas Ritchie's mastery of sectional politics and the New Orleans Picayune's popular voice and use of local color, to the emergence of progressive New South editors Henry Watterson, Francis Dawson, and Henry Grady, who imitated, as far as possible, the New Journalism of the 1880s. Unlike black and reform editors who spoke for minorities and the poor, the South's mainstream editors of the nineteenth century advanced the interests of the elite and helped create the myth of southern unity. The southern press diverged from national standards in the years of sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Addicted to editorial diatribes rather than to news gathering, these southern editors of the middle period were violent, partisan, and vindictive. They exemplified and defended freedom of the press, but the South's press was free only because southern society was closed. This work broadens our understanding of journalism of the South, while making a valuable contribution to southern history.

Mutiny on the Amistad

Mutiny on the Amistad PDF Author: Howard Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190281324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This volume presents the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history where African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. Jones describes how, in 1839, Joseph Cinqué led a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in the Caribbean. The seizure of the ship by an American naval vessel near Montauk, Long Island, the arrest of the Africans in Connecticut, and the Spanish protest against the violation of their property rights created an international controversy. The Amistad affair united Lewis Tappan and other abolitionists who put the "law of nature" on trial in the United States by their refusal to accept a legal system that claimed to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. The mutiny resulted in a trial before the U.S. Supreme Court that pitted former President John Quincy Adams against the federal government. Jones vividly recaptures this compelling drama--the most famous slavery case before Dred Scott--that climaxed in the court's ruling to free the captives and allow them to return to Africa.

The Union at Risk

The Union at Risk PDF Author: Richard E. Ellis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 is undeniably the most important major event of Andrew Jackson's two presidential terms. Attempting to declare null and void the high tariffs enacted by Congress in the late 1820s, the state of South Carolina declared that it had the right to ignore those national laws that did not suit it. Responding swiftly and decisively, Jackson issued a Proclamation reaffirming the primacy of the national government and backed this up with a Force Act, allowing him to enforce the law with troops. Although the conflict was eventually allayed by a compromise fashioned by Henry Clay, the Nullification Crisis raises paramount issues in American political history. The Union at Risk studies the doctrine of states' rights and illustrates how it directly affected national policy at a crucial point in 19th-century politics. Ellis also relates the Nullification Crisis to other major areas of Jackson's administration--his conflict with the National Bank, his Indian policy, and his relationship with the Supreme Court--providing keen insight into the most serious sectional conflict before the Civil War.