Seceding from Secession

Seceding from Secession PDF Author: Eric J. Wittenberg
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611215072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

Seceding from Secession

Seceding from Secession PDF Author: Eric J. Wittenberg
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611215072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

Gold and Freedom

Gold and Freedom PDF Author: Nicolas Barreyre
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813937752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Historians have long treated Reconstruction primarily as a southern concern isolated from broader national political developments. Yet at its core, Reconstruction was a battle for the legacy of the Civil War that would determine the political fate not only of the South but of the nation. In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs. Alongside the key issues of race and citizenship, the struggle with the new economic model and the type of society it created pervaded the entire country. Both were legacies of war. Both were fought over by the same citizens in a newly reunited nation. It was thus impossible for such closely related debates to proceed independently. A truly groundbreaking work, Gold and Freedom shows how much the fate of Reconstruction—and the political world it ultimately created—owed to northern sectional divisions, revealing important links between race and economy, as well as region and nation, not previously recognized.

The First Reconstruction

The First Reconstruction PDF Author: Van Gosse
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660113
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 759

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Book Description
It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution’s ratification through Abraham Lincoln’s election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

The Wars of Reconstruction

The Wars of Reconstruction PDF Author: Douglas R. Egerton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608195740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality-in the face of murderous violence-in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement. Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.

What Reconstruction Meant

What Reconstruction Meant PDF Author: Bruce E. Baker
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813926605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Examining the southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an essential element in understanding the society and politics of the twentieth-century South.

Before Jim Crow

Before Jim Crow PDF Author: Jane Elizabeth Dailey
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807849019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians_from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

Old Southampton

Old Southampton PDF Author: Daniel W. Crofts
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813913858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection made Virginia's Southampton County notorious. Gradually, however, the bloody spectacle receded from national memory. Although the timeless rhythms of rural life resumed after the insurrection, Southampton could not escape the forces of change. From the Age of Jackson through to secession, wartime, and Reconstruction, it shared the fate of the Old South. Many who had witnessed the insurrection lived to see Tuner's cause triumph as war destroyed the slave system, inaugurating an intense struggle to shape the new postwar order. Old Southampton links local and national history. It explains how partian loyalties developed, how white democracy flourished in the late antebellum years, how secession sharply divded neighborhoods with few slaves from those with large plantations, and how, following emancipation, former slaves challenged the prerogatives of former slaveholders. Crofts draws on two volumnious diaries and other rich records, plus rare poll lists that show how individuals voted. He vividly re-creates the experiences of planters and plain folk, slave owners and slaves, the powerful and the obscure. This deft combination of political and social history is must reading for anyone interested in the Old South and the Civil War era.

The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America PDF Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393292649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.

A Political Nation

A Political Nation PDF Author: Gary W. Gallagher
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians. In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders--those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction. The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior, A Political Nation underscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics. Contributors: Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College - William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University - Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey - William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities - Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia - Sean Nalty, University of Virginia - Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University - Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University - Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University - J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

The Negro in Virginia

The Negro in Virginia PDF Author:
Publisher: Blair
ISBN: 9780895871190
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Slavery is as basic a part of Virginia history as George Washington, who was accompanied at Valley Forge and Yorktown by his slave William Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, who directed his slaves to cut 30 feet off a mountaintop for the site of Monticello. Slavery in the Old Dominion began in 1619, when a Spanish frigate was captured and its cargo of Negroes brought to Jamestown. Virginia Negroes experienced slavery as field laborers, as skilled craftsmen, as house servants. In 1935, the Virginia Writers' Project began collecting data for a history of Negroes in the Old Dominion through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Depression. Published in 1940 as "The Negro in Virginia", it was regarded as a "classic of its kind." Modern readers will be surprised at how relevant it remains today. -- From publisher's description.