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22 - Peace and Dissent in the North

from Part IV - Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Jennifer L. Weber
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

Anger, suspicion, and recrimination characterized American politics in the 1850s. One major party wound up on history’s proverbial ash heap. Another, this one explicitly antislavery, rose in its stead. The eastern part of Kansas Territory turned into an armed camp as proslavery and antislavery guerrillas crisscrossed it; Charles Sumner’s blood stained the floor of the United States Senate; a former slaveowner serving as chief justice of the United States ruled that blacks were not American citizens regardless of where they were born; and a terrorist who happened to be on the right side of history tried to initiate a slave uprising in Virginia with his small band of fantasists and fanatics. After more than a decade of increasing tension over the question of bondage, the nation could no longer resolve its political differences either legislatively or at the ballot box. Abraham Lincoln, who represented the new Republican party, won the presidency without earning a single Southern vote in the electoral college. In the months after, seven Southern states pulled out the Union.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 461 - 479
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
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Harrison, Lowell H. The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1975.Google Scholar
Kendrick, Paul and Kendrick, Stephen. Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and the Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York: Walker, 2008).Google Scholar
Klement, Frank L. Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008).Google Scholar
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Palladino, Grace. Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Sandow, Robert M. Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Thornbrough, Emma Lou. Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Bureau & Indiana Historical Society, 1965).Google Scholar
Weber, Jennifer L. “All the President’s Men: The Politicization of Union Soldiers and How They Saved Abraham Lincoln,” in Vernon Burton, Orville, Podair, Jerald, and Weber, Jennifer L. (eds.), The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Weber, Jennifer L. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
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