John A. Quitman

John A. Quitman PDF Author: Robert E. May
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807112076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery’s long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens. A fervent disciple of South Carolina “radical” John C. Calhoun’s nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region’s most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organized a private military—or “filibustering”—expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi’s most vehement “fire-eater,” Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War. The first critical biography of this important figure, May’s study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or “antibourgeois” and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.

John A. Quitman

John A. Quitman PDF Author: Robert E. May
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807112076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery’s long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens. A fervent disciple of South Carolina “radical” John C. Calhoun’s nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region’s most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organized a private military—or “filibustering”—expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi’s most vehement “fire-eater,” Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War. The first critical biography of this important figure, May’s study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or “antibourgeois” and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.

The Fire-Eaters

The Fire-Eaters PDF Author: Eric H. Walther
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141519
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


A Continuous State of War

A Continuous State of War PDF Author: Maria Angela Diaz
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820366501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective

American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective PDF Author: Cathal Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000358054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This is the first study to systematically explore similarities, differences, and connections between the histories of American planters and Irish landlords. The book focuses primarily on the comparative and transnational investigation of an antebellum Mississippi planter named John A. Quitman (1799–1858) and a nineteenth-century Irish landlord named Robert Dillon, Lord Clonbrock (1807–93), examining their economic behaviors, ideologies, labor relations, and political histories. Locating Quitman and Clonbrock firmly within their wider local, national, and international contexts, American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective argues that the two men were representative of specific but comparable manifestations of agrarian modernity, paternalism, and conservatism that became common among the landed elites who dominated economy, society, and politics in the antebellum American South and in nineteenth-century Ireland. It also demonstrates that American planters and Irish landlords were connected by myriad direct and indirect transnational links between their societies, including transatlantic intellectual cultures, mutual participation in global capitalism, and the mass migration of people from Ireland to the United States that occurred during the nineteenth century.

A Bachelor's Life in Antebellum Mississippi

A Bachelor's Life in Antebellum Mississippi PDF Author: Elijah Millington Walker
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572332836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
"A Bachelor's Life in Antebellum Mississippi brings to the public one of the few diaries of a very intelligent yet "ordinary" man, a non-elite member of a society dominated by a planter aristocracy. The author's frankness and flair for writing reflect a way of life not often seen; this volume will thus prove a valuable addition to the body of primary documents from the early republic."--Jacket.

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861

The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 PDF Author: Yonatan Eyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The phrase 'Young America' connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign policy, and constitutionalism. Led by figures such as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and editor John L. O'Sullivan of New York, Young America Democrats gained power during the late 1840s and early 1850s. They challenged a variety of orthodox Jacksonian assumptions, influencing both the nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics. This 2007 book offers an exclusively political history of Young America's impact on the Democratic Party, complementing existing studies of the literary and cultural dimensions of this group. This close look at the Young America Democracy sheds light on the political realignments of the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War, in addition to showcasing the origins of America's longest existing political party.

America, War and Power

America, War and Power PDF Author: Lawrence Sondhaus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135981698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Written by leading historians and political scientists, this collection of essays offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the role of war in American history. Addressing the role of the armed force, and attitudes towards it, in shaping and defining the United States, the first four chapters reflect the perspectives of historians on this central question, from the time of the American Revolution to the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Chapters five and six offer the views of political scientists on the topic, one in light of the global systems theory, the other from the perspective of domestic opinion and governance. The concluding essay is written by historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, whose co-authored book The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 provided the common reading for the symposium which produced these essays. America, War and Power will be of much interest to students and scholars of US military history, US politics and military history and strategy in general.

The Road to Disunion

The Road to Disunion PDF Author: William W. Freehling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199839913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
Here is history in the grand manner, a powerful narrative peopled with dozens of memorable portraits, telling this important story with skill and relish. Freehling highlights all the key moments on the road to war, including the violence in Bleeding Kansas, Preston Brooks's beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and much more. As Freehling shows, the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a political crisis, but at first most Southerners took a cautious approach, willing to wait and see what Lincoln would do--especially, whether he would take any antagonistic measures against the South. But at this moment, the extreme fringe in the South took charge, first in South Carolina and Mississippi, but then throughout the lower South, sounding the drum roll for secession. Indeed, The Road to Disunion is the first book to fully document how this decided minority of Southern hotspurs took hold of the secessionist issue and, aided by a series of fortuitous events, drove the South out of the Union. Freehling provides compelling profiles of the leaders of this movement--many of them members of the South Carolina elite. Throughout the narrative, he evokes a world of fascinating characters and places as he captures the drama of one of America's most important--and least understood--stories. The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning Secessionists at Bay, which was hailed as "the most important history of the Old South ever published," this volume concludes a major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War. A compelling, vivid portrait of the final years of the antebellum South, The Road to Disunion will stand as an important history of its subject. "This sure-to-be-lasting work--studded with pen portraits and consistently astute in its appraisal of the subtle cultural and geographic variations in the region--adds crucial layers to scholarship on the origins of America's bloodiest conflict." --The Atlantic Monthly "Splendid, painstaking account...and so a work of history reaches into the past to illuminate the present. It is light we need, and we owe Freehling a debt for shedding it." --Washington Post "A masterful, dramatic, breathtakingly detailed narrative." --The Baltimore Sun

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics PDF Author: Robert E. May
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107469562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about 'Manifest Destiny', Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico, condemned Americans invading Latin America, and warned that Douglas's 'popular sovereignty' doctrine would unleash US slaveholders throughout Latin America. This book internationalizes America's showdown over slavery, shedding new light on the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry and Lincoln's Civil War scheme to resettle freed slaves in the tropics.

The Slave-Trader's Letter-Book

The Slave-Trader's Letter-Book PDF Author: Jim Jordan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Long-lost letters tell the story of an illegal slave shipment, a desperate Savannah businessman, and the lead-up to the Civil War. In 1858 Savannah businessman Charles Lamar, in violation of U.S. law, organized the shipment of hundreds of Africans on the luxury yacht Wanderer to Jekyll Island, Georgia. The four hundred survivors of the Middle Passage were sold into bondage. This was the first successful documented slave landing in the United States in about four decades, and it shocked a nation already on the path to civil war. Nearly thirty years later, the North American Review published excerpts from thirty of Lamar’s letters, reportedly taken from his letter book, which describe his criminal activities. However, the authenticity of the letters was in doubt until very recently. In the twenty-first century, researcher Jim Jordan found a cache of private papers belonging to Charles Lamar’s father, stored for decades in an attic in New Jersey. Among the documents was Charles Lamar’s letter book—confirming him as the author. The first part of this book recounts the flamboyant and reckless life of Lamar himself, including involvement in southern secession, the slave trade, and a plot to overthrow the government of Cuba. A portrait emerges at odds with Lamar's previous image as a savvy entrepreneur and principled rebel. Instead, we see a man who was often broke and whose volatility sabotaged him at every turn. His involvement in the slave trade was driven more by financial desperation than southern defiance. The second part presents the “Slave-Trader's Letter-Book.” Together with annotations, these seventy long-lost letters shed light on the lead-up to the Civil War from the remarkable perspective of a troubled, and troubling, figure.