Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric

Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric PDF Author: Larry E. Nelson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817350926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Aspirations to "whoop" the North notwithstanding, Confederates set their hopes for independence not on the belief that they could defeat the North but on the hope that their armies could stave off defeat long enough for the North to weary of war. The South's single biggest opportunity to effect political change in the North was the presidential contest of 1864. If Lincoln's support foundered and the North elected a president with a more flexible vision of peace on the continent, the South might realize its dream of independence. In Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, Larry Nelson vividly brings to life the complex state of Northern politics during the election year of 1863. He recounts fluctuations in the value of the dollar, draft resistance and riots, protests against emancipation, political defeats suffered by the Republicans in the elections of 1862, and growing discontent in the border states and Midwest. Nelson offers an insider's look at the administration of Jefferson Davis, as it looked for cracks in Northern unity and electoral opportunities to exploit. Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric is an engrossing account of a little-known facet of Civil War statecraft and politics.

Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric

Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric PDF Author: Larry E. Nelson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817350926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Aspirations to "whoop" the North notwithstanding, Confederates set their hopes for independence not on the belief that they could defeat the North but on the hope that their armies could stave off defeat long enough for the North to weary of war. The South's single biggest opportunity to effect political change in the North was the presidential contest of 1864. If Lincoln's support foundered and the North elected a president with a more flexible vision of peace on the continent, the South might realize its dream of independence. In Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, Larry Nelson vividly brings to life the complex state of Northern politics during the election year of 1863. He recounts fluctuations in the value of the dollar, draft resistance and riots, protests against emancipation, political defeats suffered by the Republicans in the elections of 1862, and growing discontent in the border states and Midwest. Nelson offers an insider's look at the administration of Jefferson Davis, as it looked for cracks in Northern unity and electoral opportunities to exploit. Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric is an engrossing account of a little-known facet of Civil War statecraft and politics.

Suffrage Reconstructed

Suffrage Reconstructed PDF Author: Laura E. Free
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701088
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as "male." In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed considers how and why the amendment's authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction. Free argues that the Fourteenth Amendment's language was shaped by three key groups: African American activists who used ideas about manhood to claim black men's right to the ballot, postwar congressmen who sought to justify enfranchising southern black men, and women's rights advocates who began to petition Congress for the ballot for the first time as the Amendment was being drafted. To prevent women's inadvertent enfranchisement, and to incorporate formerly disfranchised black men into the voting polity, the Fourteenth Amendment's congressional authors turned to gender to define the new American voter. Faced with this exclusion some woman suffragists, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, turned to rhetorical racism in order to mount a campaign against sex as a determinant of one's capacity to vote. Stanton's actions caused a rift with Frederick Douglass and a schism in the fledgling woman suffrage movement. By integrating gender analysis and political history, Suffrage Reconstructed offers a new interpretation of the Civil War–era remaking of American democracy, placing African American activists and women's rights advocates at the heart of nineteenth-century American conversations about public policy, civil rights, and the franchise.

Election Meltdown

Election Meltdown PDF Author: Richard L. Hasen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252862
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
From the nation’s leading expert, an indispensable analysis of key threats to the integrity of the 2020 American presidential election As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In this timely and accessible book, Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans. Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.

Ballots and Bullets

Ballots and Bullets PDF Author: James Robenalt
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 0897337166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
On July 23, 1968, police in Cleveland battled with black nationalists.The dramatic shootout in the Glenville neighborhood left ten dead and over fifteen wounded. The event sparked days of heavy rioting and raised myriad questions. Were these shootings an ambush by the nationalists? Or were the nationalists defending themselves from an imminent police assault? Mystery still surrounds how the urban warfare started and the role the FBI might have played in its origin. Cleveland's story intersected with with some of the most important African American figures of the time. Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both came to Cleveland, shaping the debate over how to address systemic racism. Should it be with nonviolence or armed self-defense? Malcolm X first delivered his iconic "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech in Cleveland. Three years later, in 1967, Carl Stokes, with King's help, became the first black mayor of a major US city. The ballot seemed to have triumphed over the bullet—and then Dr. King was assassinated. In the spring of 1968, while Mayor Stokes kept peace in Cleveland and Bobby Kennedy came to deliver his "Mindless Menace of Violence" speech, nationalists used an antipoverty program Stokes created in King's honor to buy rifles and ammunition. Ballots and Bullets examines the revolutionary calls for addressing racism through guerrilla warfare in America's streets. It also puts into perspective the political aftermath, as racial violence and rebellions in most American cities led to white backlash and provided lift to the counterrevolution that brought Richard Nixon to power, effectively marking an end to President Johnson's "War on Poverty." Fifty years later, many politicians still call for "law and order" to combat urban unrest. The Black Lives Matter movement and continued instances of police misconduct and brutality show that the cycle of race-based violence continues. The root causes—racism and poverty—remain largely unaddressed.

Reelecting Lincoln

Reelecting Lincoln PDF Author: John Waugh
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0786747110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
Here, from the author of the acclaimed book The Class of 1846, is the dramatic story of what may have been the most critical election campaign in American history. Taking place in the midst of the Civil War, the election of 1864 would determine the very future of the nation. Would the country be unified or permanently divided? Would slavery continue? Weaving rich anecdotal material into a fast-paced narrative, John C. Waugh places this pivotal election in its historical context while evoking its human drama. The men and women who figured in this epic campaign—most notably Lincoln himself—emerge with all their strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies. "It's an inherently dramatic story, and one that has been told before. But never quite so well as by John C. Waugh, [who] brings to his task the keen eye for detail and scene-setting that one would expect from a career reporter," said the Wall Street Journal. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, including published and unpublished reminiscences, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and periodicals, Waugh re-creates that fateful year with all the immediacy of a political reporter covering a national presidential election today.

The Confederacy's Last Northern Offensive

The Confederacy's Last Northern Offensive PDF Author: Steven Bernstein
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786459980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
By spring 1864, the administration of Abraham Lincoln was in serious trouble, with mounting debt, low morale and eroding political support. As spring became summer, a force of Confederate troops led by Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early marched north through the Shenandoah Valley and crossed the Potomac as Washington, D.C., and Maryland lay nearly undefended. This Civil War history explores what could have been a decisive Confederate victory and the reasons Early's invasion of Maryland stalled.

The Chessboard of War

The Chessboard of War PDF Author: Anne J. Bailey
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803212732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
No aspect of Civil War history is more fascinating than the two major campaigns that took place in the western theater in late 1864. The opposing generals, William T. Sherman and John Bell Hood, took armies that had been fighting for months and headed them away from each other: Hood marched north into Tennessee, and Sherman marched south into Georgia. As Sherman himself noted, ?It surely was a strange event; two hostile armies marching in opposite directions, each in the full belief that it was achieving a final and conclusive result in a great war.? Hood went on to catastrophic defeat at Franklin and Nashville, while Sherman successfully moved through Georgia to the coast. Many books deal with either Sherman?s march or Hood?s Tennessee campaign, but although they unfolded simultaneously and concluded the main fighting in the western theater, no recent volume analyzes the two together. In her groundbreaking study, Anne J. Bailey assesses how military events in Georgia and Tennessee intertwined and affected the political, social, and economic conditions in those areas and throughout the nation.

Diehard Rebels

Diehard Rebels PDF Author: Jason Phillips
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820328367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Concentrates on diehard rebel soldiers' faith in Confederate invincibility and reveals the history of southern culture as a continuum rather than a succession of old South, Confederacy, new South.

No Party Now

No Party Now PDF Author: Adam I. P. Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195345967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. In No Party Now, Adam I. P. Smith challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, Smith argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly non-partisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of anti-party discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. By the time of the 1864 election they sought to de-legitimize partisan opposition with slogans like "No Party Now But All For Our Country!" No Party Now offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the "party period paradigm" in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As Smith shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

Jefferson Davis, Confederate President

Jefferson Davis, Confederate President PDF Author: Herman Hattaway
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700612939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
He was one of the most embattled heads of state in American history. Charged with building a new nation while waging a war for its very independence, he accepted his responsibilities reluctantly but carried them out with a fierce dedication to his ideals. Those efforts ultimately foundered on the shoals of Confederate defeat, leaving Davis stranded in public memory as both valiant leader and desolate loser. Now two renowned Civil War historians, Herman Hattaway and Richard Beringer, take a new and closer look at Davis's presidency. In the process, they provide a clearer image of his leadership and ability to handle domestic, diplomatic, and military matters under the most trying circumstances-without the considerable industrial and population resources of the North and without the formal recognition of other nations. Hattaway and Beringer examine Davis's strengths and weaknesses as president in light of both traditional evidence and current theories of presidential leadership. They show us a man so respected that northern colleagues regretted his departure from the U.S. Senate, but so bent on Southern independence he was willing to impose unthinkable burdens on his citizens-an apologist for slavery who was committed to state rights, even while growing nationalism in his new country called for a stronger central government. In assessing Davis's actual administration of the Confederate state, the authors analyze the Confederate government's constitution, institutions, infrastructure, and cabinet-level administrators. They also integrate events of Davis's presidency with the ongoing war as it encroached upon the South, offering a panoramic view of military strategy as seen from the president's office. They tell how Davis reacted to the outcomes of key battles and campaigns in order to assess his leadership abilities, his relations with civilian and military authorities, and-his own personal competency notwithstanding-his poor judgment in selecting generals. Rich in detail and exhilaratingly told with generous selections from Davis's own letters and speeches, Hattaway and Beringer provide the most insightful account available of the first and only Confederate presidency-suggesting that perhaps it was the Confederate government, rather than Davis himself, that failed. More than that, it shows us Jefferson Davis as an American leader and offers a new appreciation of his place in our country's history.