Public Debate In The Civil War Era

"This collection of essays analyzes the rhetoric of the Civil War Era, from the Compromise of 1850 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877"--

This study is the first to critically survey the changing and highly controversial historical literature surrounding the American Civil War era, from contemporary interpretations up to the present. The racial question was one of the central causes of the war; there was recognition of the need for America to conform wholly to the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." The book both analyzes historians' attitudes and assumptions, and suggests that each writer's perspective was partly determined by the dictates of time and place.

Public debate and discussion was overshadowed by the slavery controversy during the period of the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was attacked, defended, amplified, and mitigated. This happened in the halls of Congress, the courts, the political debate, the public platform, and the lecture hall. This volume examines the issues, speakers, and venues for this controversy between 1850 and 1877. It combines exploration of the broad contours of controversy with careful analysis of specific speakers and texts.

This illuminating book examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J. Purcell reveals, Americans' participation in these funeral rites led to contemplation and contestation over the political and social meanings of the war and the roles played by the honored dead. Public mourning for military heroes, reformers, and politicians distilled political and social anxieties as the country coped with the aftermath of mass death and casualties. Purcell shows how large-scale funerals for figures such as Henry Clay and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson set patterns for mourning culture and Civil War commemoration; after 1865, public funerals for figures such as Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis elaborated on these patterns and fostered public debate about the meanings of the war, Reconstruction, race, and gender.

Great Debates in American History is a seminal work in the field of US history. This volume focuses on the Civil War, presenting a range of primary source documents and speeches that shed light on the major issues of this critical period in American history. Edited by two of the foremost scholars in the field, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in American history and the Civil War. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

“Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts—and tips America over the edge into ruin. These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists—journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.

Near the end of a nine-month confrontation preceding the Compromise of 1850, Abraham Venable warned his fellow congressmen that "words become things." Indeed, in politics—then, as now—rhetoric makes reality. But while the legislative maneuvering, factional alignments, and specific measures of the Compromise of 1850 have been exhaustively studied, much of the language of the debate, where underlying beliefs and assumptions were revealed, has been neglected. The Compromise of 1850 attempted to defuse confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War—which would be free, which would allow slavery, and how the Fugitive Slave Law would be enacted. A Strife of Tongues tells the cultural and intellectual history of this pivotal political event through the lens of language, revealing the complex context of northern and southern ideological opposition within which the Civil War occurred a decade later. Deftly drawing on extensive records, from public discourse to private letters, Stephen Maizlish animates the most famous political characters of the age in their own words. This novel account reveals a telling irony—that the Compromise debates of 1850 only made obvious the hardening of sectional division of ideology, which led to a breakdown in the spirit of compromise in the antebellum period and laid the foundations of the U.S. Civil War.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.