Lincoln's Resolute Unionist

Lincoln's Resolute Unionist PDF Author: Dennis K. Boman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798--1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman's full-scale account of Gamble's life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre--Civil War Missouri, fought to end slavery and to protect the integrity of the Union, Lincoln's Resolute Unionist corrects prevailing notions about solidarity among the South's antebellum elite on these issues. The slaveholding border state of Missouri figured greatly in the sectional crisis from the time of its controversial admission to the Union up through the war itself, when it was the site of internecine battles between Unionists and Confederates. The complexities of the period and of the political alliances formed then emerge clearly in Boman's biography of Gamble. A fundamental conservatism -- Gamble believed judges should interpret, not make, law -- led the southern slave owner to dissent from his colleagues' proslavery decision in Scott v. Emerson. These same principles, along with Gamble's Whig affiliation and Christian convictions, made firm his antisecessionist stance despite his proslavery predilections. Boman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Lincoln's involvement in Missouri's affairs, including his assistance to Gamble in maintaining security and passing a state ordinance for gradual emancipation. Lincoln's Resolute Unionist brings to light in a compelling fashion the meaning -- and the drama -- of the life of a key figure at a critical time in American history.

Lincoln's Resolute Unionist

Lincoln's Resolute Unionist PDF Author: Dennis K. Boman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book

Book Description
As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798--1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman's full-scale account of Gamble's life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre--Civil War Missouri, fought to end slavery and to protect the integrity of the Union, Lincoln's Resolute Unionist corrects prevailing notions about solidarity among the South's antebellum elite on these issues. The slaveholding border state of Missouri figured greatly in the sectional crisis from the time of its controversial admission to the Union up through the war itself, when it was the site of internecine battles between Unionists and Confederates. The complexities of the period and of the political alliances formed then emerge clearly in Boman's biography of Gamble. A fundamental conservatism -- Gamble believed judges should interpret, not make, law -- led the southern slave owner to dissent from his colleagues' proslavery decision in Scott v. Emerson. These same principles, along with Gamble's Whig affiliation and Christian convictions, made firm his antisecessionist stance despite his proslavery predilections. Boman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Lincoln's involvement in Missouri's affairs, including his assistance to Gamble in maintaining security and passing a state ordinance for gradual emancipation. Lincoln's Resolute Unionist brings to light in a compelling fashion the meaning -- and the drama -- of the life of a key figure at a critical time in American history.

Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri

Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri PDF Author: Dennis K. Boman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807138250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
During the Civil War, the state of Missouri presented President Abraham Lincoln, United States military commanders, and state officials with an array of complex and difficult problems. Although Missouri did not secede, a large minority of residents owned slaves, sympathized with secession, or favored the Confederacy. Many residents joined a Confederate state militia, became pro-Confederate guerrillas, or helped the cause of the South in some subversive manner. In order to subdue such disloyalty, Lincoln supported Missouri's provisional Unionist government by ordering troops into the state and approving an array of measures that ultimately infringed on the civil liberties of residents. In this thorough investigation of these policies, Dennis K. Boman reveals the difficulties that the president, military officials, and state authorities faced in trying to curb traitorous activity while upholding the spirit of the United States Constitution. Boman explains that despite Lincoln's desire to disentangle himself from Missouri policy matters, he was never able to do so. Lincoln's challenge in Missouri continued even after the United States Army defeated the state's Confederate militia. Attention quickly turned to preventing Confederate guerrillas from attacking Missouri's railway system and from ruthlessly murdering, pillaging, and terrorizing loyal inhabitants. Eventually military officials established tribunals to prosecute captured insurgents. In his role as commander-in-chief, Lincoln oversaw these tribunals and worked with Missouri governor Hamilton R. Gamble in establishing additional policies to repress acts of subversion while simultaneously protecting constitutional rights -- an incredibly difficult balancing act. For example, while supporting the suppression of disloyal newspapers and the arrest of persons suspected of aiding the enemy, Lincoln repealed orders violating property rights when they conflicted with federal law. While mitigating the severity of sentences handed down by military courts, Boman shows, Lincoln advocated requiring voters and officeholders to take loyalty oaths and countenanced the summary execution of guerrillas captured with weapons in the field. One of the first books to explore Lincoln's role in dealing with an extensive guerrilla insurgency, Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri illustrates the difficulty of suppressing dissent while upholding the Constitution, a feat as complicated during the Civil War as it is for the War on Terror.

Union General

Union General PDF Author: William L. Shea
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640125582
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Union General is the first biography of Samuel Ryan Curtis, the most important and most successful general on either side in the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. Curtis was a West Point graduate, Mexican War veteran, and determined foe of secession who gave up his seat in Congress to fight for the Union. At Pea Ridge in 1862 and Westport in 1864, he marched hundreds of miles across hostile countryside, routed Confederate armies larger than his own, and reestablished Federal control over large swathes of rebel territory. In addition to his remarkable success as a largely independent field commander, Curtis was one of only a handful of abolitionist generals in the Union army. He dealt a heavy blow to slavery in the Trans-Mississippi and Mississippi Valley months before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. His enlightened racial policies and practices generated a storm of criticism and led to his temporary suspension in the middle of the conflict--but he was restored to active duty in time to win a crushing victory at Westport, where he saved Kansas and put an end to Price's Raid. Before the war Curtis was an accomplished civil engineer, a prime mover of the transcontinental railroad, and an important figure in the emerging Republican Party and was elected three times to the House of Representatives from Iowa. After the war he participated in pioneering efforts in peacemaking with the Plains Indians and helped oversee construction of the Union Pacific across Nebraska. This biography restores Curtis to his rightful place in American history and adds significantly to our understanding of the Civil War.

Lincoln and the Border States

Lincoln and the Border States PDF Author: William C. Harris
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070062015X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Adopting a new approach to an American icon, an award-winning scholar reexamines the life of Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate how his remarkable political acumen and leadership skills evolved during the intense partisan conflict in pre-Civil War Illinois. By describing Lincoln's rise from obscurity to the presidency, William Harris shows that Lincoln's road to political success was far from easy-and that his reaction to events wasn't always wise or his racial attitudes free of prejudice. Although most scholars have labeled Lincoln a moderate, Harris reveals that he was by his own admission a conservative who revered the Founders and advocated "adherence to the old and tried." By emphasizing the conservative bent that guided Lincoln's political evolution-his background as a Henry Clay Whig, his rural ties, his cautious nature, and the racial and political realities of central Illinois-Harris provides fresh insight into Lincoln's political ideas and activities and portrays him as morally opposed to slavery but fundamentally conservative in his political strategy against it. Interweaving aspects of Lincoln's life and character that were an integral part of his rise to prominence, Harris provides in-depth coverage of Lincoln's controversial term in Congress, his re-emergence as the leader of the antislavery coalition in Illinois, and his Senate campaign against Stephen A.Douglas. He particularly describes how Lincoln organized the antislavery coalition into the Republican Party while retaining the support of its diverse elements, and sheds new light on Lincoln's ongoing efforts to bring Know Nothing nativists into the coalition without alienating ethnic groups. He also provides new information and analysis regarding Lincoln's nomination and election to the presidency, the selection of his cabinet, and his important role as president-elect during the secession crisis of 1860-1861. Challenging prevailing views, Harris portrays Lincoln as increasingly driven not so much by his own ambitions as by his antislavery sentiments and his fear for the republic in the hands of Douglas Democrats, and he shows how the unique political skills Lincoln developed in Illinois shaped his wartime leadership abilities. By doing so, he opens a window on his political ideas and influences and offers a fresh understanding of this complex figure.

Lincoln's Proclamation

Lincoln's Proclamation PDF Author: William Alan Blair
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The eight contributors to this volume assess the proclamation by considering not only aspects of the president's decision making, but also events beyond Washington. --from publisher description

Abraham Lincoln and the Union

Abraham Lincoln and the Union PDF Author: Nathaniel W.. Stephenson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Houses Divided

Houses Divided PDF Author: Lucas Volkman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190248335
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Houses Divided provides new insights into the significance of the nineteenth-century evangelical schisms that arose initially over the moral question of African American bondage. Volkman examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the slaveholding border state of Missouri. He maintains that congregational and local denominational ruptures before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union in that state from 1837 to 1876. The schisms were interlinked religious, legal, constitutional, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States from the late 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by the race, class, and gender dynamics that marked the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural church-goers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. The schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal and constitutional controversies that shaped pro-and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

Abolitionizing Missouri

Abolitionizing Missouri PDF Author: Kristen Layne Anderson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Historians have long known that German immigrants provided much of the support for emancipation in southern Border States. Kristen Layne Anderson's Abolitionizing Missouri, however, is the first analysis of the reasons behind that opposition as well as the first exploration of the impact that the Civil War and emancipation had on German immigrants' ideas about race. Anderson focuses on the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri, looking particularly at the ways in which German attitudes towards African Americans and the institution of slavery changed over time. Anderson suggests that although some German Americans deserved their reputation for racial egalitarianism, many others opposed slavery only when it served their own interests to do so. When slavery did not seem to affect their lives, they ignored it; once it began to threaten the stability of the country or their ability to get land, they opposed it. After slavery ended, most German immigrants accepted the American racial hierarchy enough to enjoy its benefits, and had little interest in helping tear it down, particularly when doing so angered their native-born white neighbors. Anderson's work counters prevailing interpretations in immigration and ethnic history, where until recently, scholars largely accepted that German immigrants were solidly antislavery. Instead, she uncovers a spectrum of Germans' "antislavery" positions and explores the array of individual motives driving such diverse responses.. In the end, Anderson demonstrates that Missouri Germans were more willing to undermine the racial hierarchy by questioning slavery than were most white Missourians, although after emancipation, many of them showed little interest in continuing to demolish the hierarchy that benefited them by fighting for black rights.

Abe Lincoln’s Secret War Against The North

Abe Lincoln’s Secret War Against The North PDF Author: John Chodes
Publisher: Algora Publishing
ISBN: 1628941138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Abraham Lincoln, an American icon, was feared and hated during his presidency as a brutal dictator. His severe attacks on New York, Maryland, Indiana and Missouri show that he was turning the United States into a permanently militarized nation. Lincoln was reviled not only by Southerners and by his political rivals (the Democrats), but also to a surprising degree by the rank and file of his own Republican Party. He won the war, and so he is remembered as “Honest Abe” and the “Great Emancipator.” But through this investigation of three Northern states that opposed Abraham Lincoln’s policies, and even one state that had fervently supported him, the true picture becomes more clear. Why is this story important for today? Because many of the negatives in 21st-century American society—the centralization of power in Washington, political indifference to the popular will, the continual expansion of the “military–industrial complex,” can all be traced to their starting point: Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. The Radical wing of Lincoln’s Republican Party was a precursor of the 20th- and 21st-century totalitarian regimes. These Radicals believed in, and fulfilled, their goal of one-party rule. This goal was not shaped by four years of brutalizing war but was inherent in their ideology from the beginning.

A Union Indivisible

A Union Indivisible PDF Author: Michael D. Robinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Many accounts of the secession crisis overlook the sharp political conflict that took place in the Border South states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Michael D. Robinson expands the scope of this crisis to show how the fate of the Border South, and with it the Union, desperately hung in the balance during the fateful months surrounding the clash at Fort Sumter. During this period, Border South politicians revealed the region's deep commitment to slavery, disputed whether or not to leave the Union, and schemed to win enough support to carry the day. Although these border states contained fewer enslaved people than the eleven states that seceded, white border Southerners chose to remain in the Union because they felt the decision best protected their peculiar institution. Robinson reveals anew how the choice for union was fraught with anguish and uncertainty, dividing families and producing years of bitter internecine violence. Letters, diaries, newspapers, and quantitative evidence illuminate how, in the absence of a compromise settlement, proslavery Unionists managed to defeat secession in the Border South.