Author: Andy May
Publisher: Andy May Petrophysicist LLC
ISBN: 1646698819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
The Bleeding Kansas period lasts from 1854 when Kansas was opened to white settlement until 1861, when it became a state. What were the people like? Why did thousands of people fight and die over the issue of slavery? Some claim it was only money, but this does not ring true, it had to be more than that for the fighting to be so fierce. During the 1850s, popular votes were used to determine which states were free and which were slave, why didn’t this work? Why was “popular sovereignty” a “living, creeping lie” according to the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln? And yet, popular sovereignty was the solution proposed by the anti-slavery Northern Democratic Presidential nominee, Stephen A. Douglas, why? For that matter, why did the Democratic Party split into two parties allowing Lincoln to slip in and win with 40% of the vote? Most importantly, why did so many pro-slavery Democrats come to Kansas and quickly become Republican and anti-slavery? This book examines the Kansas immigrants and their radical transformation. We use the immigrant’s first-hand accounts, from privately published autobiographies, published essays, letters, and standard histories to tell the story of the people of Kansas in this critical period in American history.
Author: Andy May
Publisher: American Freedom Publications LLC
ISBN: 9781646698806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
To live in the Kansas Territory in 1854 and survive through the Civil War would take courage and stamina. The entire population that year was either pro-slavery or they were against slavery. As Andy May reveals in this remarkable, well researched history of that period, there were both noble and shameful motivations in the two factions. The anti-slavery, or Free-State side included the abolitionists. They may have had the purest of motives; however, there were some anti-slavery settlers that just didn't want to compete with slaves for work. The pro-slavery faction was the faction of the South. In their minds, blacks were born to be slaves. Andy May's in-depth research and attention to facts makes this history come to life. It is the story that has been missing from our American History textbooks and it is not taught in colleges and universities. While this time in our history has been romanticized by Hollywood, those renditions are less than accurate. That is a shame since this period in the Kansas Territory is the prelude to the Civil War and served as the catalyst for that dreadful time in the nation. There is a family connection in this book as well. Andy May's great, great, granduncle was Caleb May, a signer of all three Kansas Free-State Constitutions. By 1857, about three-fourths of the voting population was anti-slavery and a growing minority were for equal rights for blacks. By 1861 a majority were for equal rights. This was a remarkably rapid change in views. It seemed that when people moved to Kansas, they often quickly became anti-slavery, as Caleb May did. The idea that slavery was morally wrong was an emerging idea.
Author: Andy May
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781646698790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
BLOOD AND HONOR: The People of Bleeding KansasTo live in the Kansas Territory in 1854 and survive through the Civil War would take courage and stamina. The entire population that year was either pro-slavery or they were against slavery. As Andy May reveals in this remarkable, well researched history of that period, there were both noble and shameful motivations in the two factions. The anti-slavery, or Free-State side included the abolitionists. They may have had the purest of motives; however, there were some anti-slavery settlers that just didn't want to compete with slaves for work. The pro-slavery faction was the faction of the South. In their minds, blacks were born to be slaves.Andy May's in-depth research and attention to facts makes this history come to life. It is the story that has been missing from our American History textbooks and it is not taught in colleges and universities. While this time in our history has been romanticized by Hollywood, those renditions are less than accurate. That is a shame since this period in the Kansas Territory is the prelude to the Civil War and served as the catalyst for that dreadful time in the nation.There is a family connection in this book as well. Andy May's great, great, granduncle was Caleb May, a signer of all three Kansas Free-State Constitutions. By 1857, about three-fourths of the voting population was anti-slavery and a growing minority were for equal rights for blacks. By 1861 a majority were for equal rights. This was a remarkably rapid change in views. It seemed that when people moved to Kansas, they often quickly became anti-slavery, as Caleb May did. The idea that slavery was morally wrong was an emerging idea.
Author: Joanne B. Freeman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717613
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
"One of the best history books I've read in the last few years." —Chris Hayes The Field of Blood recounts the previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF SMITHSONIAN'S BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF THE YEAR Historian Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery. These fights didn’t happen in a vacuum. Freeman’s dramatic accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war. In the process, she brings the antebellum Congress to life, revealing its rough realities—the feel, sense, and sound of it—as well as its nation-shaping import. Funny, tragic, and rivetingly told, The Field of Blood offers a front-row view of congressional mayhem and sheds new light on the careers of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and other luminaries, as well as introducing a host of lesser-known but no less fascinating men. The result is a fresh understanding of the workings of American democracy and the bonds of Union on the eve of their greatest peril.
Author: Williamjames Hull Hoffer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
A signal, violent event in the history of the United States Congress, the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor embodied the complex North-South cultural divide of the mid-nineteenth century. Williamjames Hull Hoffer's vivid account of the brutal act demonstrates just how far the sections had drifted apart and explains why the coming war was so difficult to avoid. Sumner, a noted abolitionist and gifted speaker, was seated at his Senate desk on May 22, 1856, when Democratic Congressman Preston S. Brooks approached, pulled out a gutta-percha walking stick, and struck him on the head. Brooks continued to beat the stunned Sumner, forcing him to the ground and repeatedly striking him even as the cane shattered. He then pursued the bloodied, staggering Republican senator up the Senate aisle until Sumner collapsed at the feet of Congressman Edwin B. Morgan. Colleagues of the two intervened only after Brooks appeared intent on beating the unconscious Sumner severely—and, perhaps, to death. Sumner's crime? Speaking passionately about the evils of slavery, which dishonored both the South and Brooks’s relative, Senator Andrew P. Butler. Celebrated in the South for the act, Brooks was fined only three hundred dollars, dying a year later of a throat infection. Sumner recovered and served out a distinguished Senate career until his death in 1873. Hoffer's narrative recounts the caning and its aftermath, explores the depths of the differences between free and slave states in 1856, and explains the workings of the Southern honor culture as opposed to Yankee idealism. Hoffer helps us understand why Brooks would take such great offense at a political speech and why he chose a cane—instead of dueling with pistols or swords—to meet his obligation under the South’s prevailing code of honor. He discusses why the courts meted out a comparatively light sentence. He addresses the importance of the event in the national crisis and shows why such actions are not quite as alien to today’s politics as they might at first seem.
Author: James E. Sherow
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806162945
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail—and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet. The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy’s vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post–Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy’s way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys’ vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London. Joseph McCoy’s enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation’s stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.
Author: Patricia Beatty
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0688144225
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
In the early years of the Civil War, teenage Kansan farm boy Lije Tulley becomes a Jayhawker, an abolitionist raider freeing slaves from the neighboring state of Missouri, and then goes undercover there as a spy.
Author: Robert K. Sutton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510716513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
A town at the center of the United States becomes the site of an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. In May, 1854, Massachusetts was in an uproar. A judge, bound by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, had just ordered a young African American man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in Boston to be returned to bondage in the South. An estimated fifty thousand citizens rioted in protest. Observing the scene was Amos Adams Lawrence, a wealthy Bostonian, who “waked up a stark mad Abolitionist.” As quickly as Lawrence waked up, he combined his fortune and his energy with others to create the New England Emigrant Aid Company to encourage abolitionists to emigrate to Kansas to ensure that it would be a free state. The town that came to bear Lawrence’s name became the battleground for the soul of America, with abolitionists battling pro-slavery Missourians who were determined to make Kansas a slave state. The onset of the Civil War only escalated the violence, leading to the infamous raid of William Clarke Quantrill when he led a band of vicious Confederates (including Frank James, whose brother Jesse would soon join them) into town and killed two hundred men and boys. Stark Mad Abolitionists shows how John Brown, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Sam Houston, and Abraham Lincoln all figure into the story of Lawrence and “Bleeding Kansas.” The story of Amos Lawrence’s eponymous town is part of a bigger story of people who were willing to risk their lives and their fortunes in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality.
Author: Frederick Douglass
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3385512875
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.
Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486664
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592
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Book Description
An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history.Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.
