Bibliograph

Making an antislavery nation, Lincoln, Douglas, and the battle over freedom, Graham A. Peck

Type

Label

Making an antislavery nation, Lincoln, Douglas, and the battle over freedom, Graham A. Peck

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

resource.governmentPublication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

maps

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Making an antislavery nation

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

982185033

Responsibility statement

Graham A. Peck

Sub title

Lincoln, Douglas, and the battle over freedom

Summary

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation. Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered Civil War. Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America. --From jacket flap

Table Of Contents

Prelude: an inheritance of slavery -- The nation's conflict over slavery in miniature: Illinois, 1818-1824 -- Democrats, Whigs, and party conflict, 1825-1842 -- Manifest Destiny, slavery, and the rupture of the Democratic Party, 1843-1847 -- Advocates for an antislavery nation, 1837-1848 -- Stephen A. Douglas and the northern democratic origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1849-1854 -- The collapse of the Douglas democracy, 1854-1860 -- Abraham Lincoln and the triumph of an antislavery nationalism, 1854-1860 -- Conclusion: the northern Democrats' dilemma over slavery

Classification