These letters by New England soldiers and their families, many published for the first time, speak of the hardships of the war, especially frustrations with the army, homefront suffering, and government policies. They are grouped by six major themes: the military experience, the meaning of the war, views of the South, politics on the home front, the personal sacrifices of war, and the correspondence of one New England family.

Expelled from occupied New Orleans by Federal forces after refusing to pledge loyalty to the Union, Henri Garidel remained in exile from his home and family from 1863 to 1865. Lonely, homesick, and alienated, the French-Catholic Garidel, a clerk in the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance, was a complete outsider in the wartime capital of Richmond. In his faithfully kept diary, Garidel relates the trials and discomforts—physical, emotional, spiritual, and professional—of life in a city entirely foreign to him. Civil War Richmonders were predominantly white, evangelical Protestants in a relatively small, insular city. His living quarters devolved from a private home shared with his family in cosmopolitan New Orleans to a cramped, cold rooming house away from everything familiar. Trapped in Richmond for the last two years of the conflict and a witness to the eventual Federal occupation of the city, Garidel made daily entries that offer a striking and realistic blend of Southern domestic and political life during the Civil War. From his candid remarks about slavery and race, gender issues, military history, immigration, social class and structure, and religion, Henri Garidel's readers gain a revealing human picture of a major turning point in American history.

Distinguished from traditional historical narrative by its balanced portrayal of wartime experiences both at home and on the battlefield and flavored by its vivid portrayal of a divided Appalachian community, Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South breaks new ground in Southern social, political, and economic history. Martin Crawford contends that the experiences of Ashe County's men and women during the Civil War era were shaped as much by their membership in the wider American society as by uniquely local factors. Through a thoughtful blending of family correspondence, local and state historical documents, and the broader news of the divided country, Crawford re-creates the lives of Ashe County's citizens. Among them are teenager Selina Howell, whose suicide draws the reader into an intimate portrayal of kin and community dynamics, and Tom Crumpler, the young lawyer-politician who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause he initially opposed. These people and their stories bring to life the very human side of the Civil War, carrying Crawford's narrative well beyond ordinary social history.

Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg. Nonetheless, the city has, until now, lacked an adequate military history, let alone a history of the civilian home front. The noted Civil War historian A. Wilson Greene now provides an expertly researched, eloquently written study of the city that was second only to Richmond in size and strategic significance. Industrial, commercial, and extremely prosperous, Petersburg was also home to a large African American community, including the state’s highest percentage of free blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, the city elected a conservative, pro-Union approach to the sectional crisis. Little more than a month before Virginia’s secession did Petersburg finally express pro-Confederate sentiments, at which point the city threw itself wholeheartedly into the effort, with large numbers of both white and black men serving. Over the next four years, Petersburg’s citizens watched their once-beautiful city become first a conduit for transient soldiers from the Deep South, then an armed camp, and finally the focus of one of the Civil War’s most protracted and damaging campaigns. (The fall of Richmond and collapse of the Confederate war effort in Virginia followed close on Grant’s ultimate success in Petersburg.) At war’s end, Petersburg’s antebellum prosperity evaporated under pressures from inflation, chronic shortages, and the extensive damage done by Union artillery shells. Greene’s book tracks both Petersburg’s civilian experience and the city’s place in Confederate military strategy and administration. Employing scores of unpublished sources, the book weaves a uniquely personal story of thousands of citizens—free blacks, slaves and their holders, factory owners, merchants—all of whom shared a singular experience in Civil War Virginia.

Take Care of the Living assesses the short- and long-term impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Using letters, diaries, church minutes, and military and state records, as well as close analysis of the entire 1860 and 1870 Pittsylvania County manuscript population census, McClurken explores the consequences of the war for over three thousand Confederate soldiers and their families. The author reveals an array of strategies employed by those families to come to terms with their postwar reality, including reorganizing and reconstructing the household, turning to local churches for emotional and economic support, pleading with local elites for financial assistance or positions, sending psychologically damaged family members to a state-run asylum, and looking to the state for direct assistance in the form of replacement limbs for amputees, pensions, and even state-supported homes for old soldiers and widows. Although these strategies or institutions for reconstructing the family had their roots in existing practices, the extreme need brought on by the scope and impact of the Civil War required an expansion beyond anything previously seen. McClurken argues that this change serves as a starting point for the study of the evolution of southern welfare.

The Big House after Slavery examines the economic, social, and political challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat and emancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded to postwar problems and how their adaptations to life without slavery altered their marital relationships and their conceptions of gender roles. Unable to afford many servants in the new free labor economy, many of Virginia’s former masters put themselves to work on their plantations, and their wives had to expand their responsibilities as well, taking on the tasks of cooking and cleaning in addition to working in the garden, the henhouse, and the dairy. Laboring in these ways and struggling to maintain their standing as elites contributed to an identity crisis among Virginia planters. It also led them to practice mutuality within their own marriages and to reconsider what proper Southern womanhood and manhood meant in the new postwar order. Using newspapers, periodicals, organization records, and numerous letters from Virginia plantation families, Morsman captures how these frustrated elites made sense of embarrassing postwar changes, in the private but also in the public spheres they inhabited. Morsman suggests that the planters’ adaptations may have been carried forward by their adult children away from the crumbling plantations and into the urban households of the New South.

Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In The Enemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals―including those involving John C. Frémont’s administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler’s in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton trade―to deeper anxieties. The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation’s wars and in every period of the nation’s history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats. In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens’ definitions of corruption manifested their specific of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners’ most cherished beliefs and values.

George S. Bernard was a Petersburg lawyer and member of the 12th Virginia Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Over the course of his life, Bernard wrote extensively about his wartime experiences and collected accounts from other veterans. In 1892, he published War Talks of Confederate Veterans, a collection of firsthand accounts focusing on the battles and campaigns of the 12th Virginia that is widely read to this day. Bernard prepared a second volume but was never able to publish it. After his death in 1912, his papers became scattered or simply lost. But a series of finds, culminating with the discovery of a cache of papers in Roanoke in 2004, have made it possible to reconstruct a complete manuscript of the unpublished second volume. The resulting book, Civil War Talks, contains speeches, letters, Bernard's wartime diary, and other firsthand accounts of the war not only by veterans of the Confederacy, such as General William Mahone, but by Union veterans as well. Their personal stories cover the major military campaigns in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—Seven Pines, Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Appomattox. For the general reader, this volume offers evocative testimonies focusing on the experiences of individual soldiers. For scholars, it provides convenient access to many accounts that, until now, have not been widely available or have been simply unknown.

In antebellum society, women were regarded as ideal nurses because of their sympathetic natures. However, they were expected to exercise their talents only in the home; nursing strange men in hospitals was considered inappropriate, if not indecent. Nevertheless, in defiancé of tradition, Confederate women set up hospitals early in the Civil War and organized volunteers to care for the increasing number of sick and wounded soldiers. As a fledgling government engaged in a long and bloody war, the Confederacy relied on this female labor, which prompted a new understanding of women’s place in public life and a shift in gender roles. Challenging the assumption that Southern women’s contributions to the war effort were less systematic and organized than those of Union women, Worth a Dozen Men looks at the Civil War as a watershed moment for Southern women. Female nurses in the South played a critical role in raising army and civilian morale and reducing mortality rates, thus allowing the South to continue fighting. They embodied a new model of heroic energy and nationalism, and came to be seen as the female equivalent of soldiers. Moreover, nursing provided them with a foundation for pro-Confederate political activity, both during and after the war, when gender roles and race relations underwent dramatic changes. Worth a Dozen Men chronicles the Southern wartime nursing experience, tracking the course of the conflict from the initial burst of Confederate nationalism to the shock and sorrow of losing the war. Through newspapers and official records, as well as letters, diaries, and memoirs―not only those of the remarkable and dedicated women who participated, but also of the doctors with whom they served, their soldier patients, and the patients’ families―a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a nurse in the South during the Civil War emerges.

Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818, but from this most humble of beginnings, he rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans. He not only survived slavery to live in freedom but also became an outspoken critic of the institution and an active participant in the U.S. political system. Douglass advised presidents of the United States and formally represented his country in the diplomatic corps. He was the most prominent African American activist of the nineteenth century, and he left a treasure trove of documentary evidence detailing his life in slavery and achievements in freedom. This volume gathers and interprets valuable selections from a variety of Douglass’s writings, including speeches, editorials, correspondence, and autobiographies.

Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts―the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"―and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.

One of the Confederacy's most loyal adherents and articulate advocates was Lieutenant Grant James Longstreet's aide-de-camp, Thomas Jewett Goree. Present at Longstreet's headquarters and party to the counsels of Robert E. Lee and his lieutenants, Goree wrote incisively on matters of strategy and politics and drew revealing portraits of Longstreet, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, John Bell Hood, J.E.B. Stuart, and others of Lee's inner circle. His letters are some of the richest and most perceptive from the Civil War period. Thomas Cutrer has collected all of Goree's wartime correspondence to his family, as well as his travel diary from June-August 1865. With its wide scope and rich detail, Longstreet's Aide represents an invaluable addition to the Civil War letter collections published in recent years. While Goree's letters will fascinate Civil War buffs, they also provide a unique opportunity for scholars of social and military history to witness from inside the workings of both an extended Southern family and the forces of the Confederacy.

War upon Our Border examines the experiences of two Ohio River Valley communities during the turmoil and social upheaval of the American Civil War. Although on opposite sides of the border between slavery and freedom, Corydon, Indiana, and Frankfort, Kentucky, shared a legacy of white settlement and a distinct western identity, which fostered unity and emphasized cooperation during the first year of the war. But subsequent guerrilla raids, military occupation, economic hardship, political turmoil, and racial tension ultimately divided citizens living on either side of the river border. Once a conduit for all kinds of relationships, the Ohio River became a barrier dividing North and South by the end of the conflict. Centered on the experience of local politicians, civic leaders, laborers, soldiers, and civilians, this combined social and military history addresses major interpretative debates, including how citizens chose allegiances, what role slavery played in soldier and civilian motivation, and the nature of life on the home front. Examining manuscripts, newspapers, and government documents, War upon Our Border employs a microhistorical approach to link the experiences of common people with the sweeping national events of the Civil War era. The resulting study reveals the lingering effect of the war's memory and how the effort to construct a new regional dynamic continues to shape popular conceptions of the period.

Although much is known about the political stance of the military at large during the Civil War, the political party affiliations of individual soldiers have received little attention. Drawing on archival sources from twenty-five generals and 250 volunteer officers and enlisted men, John Matsui offers the first major study to examine the ways in which individual politics were as important as military considerations to battlefield outcomes and how the experience of war could alter soldiers’ political views. The conservative war aims pursued by Abraham Lincoln’s generals (and to some extent, the president himself) in the first year of the American Civil War focused on the preservation of the Union and the restoration of the antebellum status quo. This approach was particularly evident in the prevailing policies and attitudes toward Confederacy-supporting Southern civilians and slavery. But this changed in Virginia during the summer of 1862 with the formation of the Army of Virginia. If the Army of the Potomac (the major Union force in Virginia) was dominated by generals who concurred with the ideology of the Democratic Party, the Army of Virginia (though likewise a Union force) was its political opposite, from its senior generals to the common soldiers. The majority of officers and soldiers in the Army of Virginia saw slavery and pro-Confederate civilians as crucial components of the rebel war effort and blamed them for prolonging the war. The frustrating occupation experiences of the Army of Virginia radicalized them further, making them a vanguard against Southern rebellion and slavery within the Union army as a whole and paving the way for Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Civil War forced America finally to confront the contradiction between its founding values and human slavery. At the center of this historic confrontation was Abraham Lincoln. By the time this Illinois politician had risen to the office of president, the dilemma of slavery had expanded to the question of all African Americans’ future. In this fascinating new book Paul Escott considers the evolution of the president’s thoughts on race in relation to three other, powerful—and often conflicting—voices. Lincoln’s fellow Republicans Charles Sumner and Montgomery Blair played crucial roles in the shaping of their party. While both Sumner and Blair were opposed to slavery, their motivations reflected profoundly different approaches to the issue. Blair’s antislavery stance stemmed from a racist dedication to remove African Americans from the country altogether. Sumner, in contrast, opposed slavery as a crusader for racial equality and a passionate abolitionist. Lincoln maintained close personal relationships with both men as he wrestled with the slavery question. In addition to these antislavery voices, Escott also weaves into his narrative the other extreme, of which Lincoln was politically aware: the virulent racism and hierarchical values that motivated not only the Confederates but surprisingly many Northerners and which were embodied by the president’s eventual assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Sumner, Blair, and violent racists like Booth each represent forces with which Lincoln had to contend as he presided over a brutal civil war and faced the issues of slavery and equality lying at its root. Other books and films have provided glimpses of the atmosphere in which the president created his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln’s Dilemma evokes more fully and brings to life the men Lincoln worked with, and against, as he moved racial equality forward. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

The decision of the eventual Confederate states to secede from the Union set in motion perhaps the most dramatic chapter in American history, and one that has typically been told on a grand scale. In Daydreams and Nightmares, however, historian Brent Tarter shares the story of one Virginia family who found themselves in the middle of the secession debate and saw their world torn apart as the states chose sides and went to war. George Berlin was elected to serve as a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861 as an opponent of secession, but he ultimately changed his vote. Later, when defending his decision in a speech in his hometown of Buckhannon, Upshur County, he had to flee for his safety as Union soldiers arrived. Berlin and his wife, Susan Holt Berlin, were separated for extended periods—both during the convention and, later, during the early years of the Civil War. The letters they exchanged tell a harrowing story of uncertainty and bring to life for the modern reader an extended family that encompassed both Confederate and Union sympathizers. This is in part a love story. It is also a story about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Although unique in its vividly evoked details, the Berlins’ story is representative of the drama endured by millions of Americans. Composed during the nightmare of civil war, the Berlins’ remarkably articulate letters express the dreams of reunion and a secure future felt throughout the entire, severed nation. In this intimate, evocative, and often heartbreaking family story, we see up close the personal costs of our larger national history. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War

In 1863 Confederate forces under Lieutenant General James Longstreet, while scouring Southside Virginia for badly needed supplies, threatened the Union garrison in Suffolk. For the residents of surrounding Nansemond, Isle of Wight, and Southampton Counties, the Suffolk campaign followed an exhausting and deadly pattern. Already subjected to the demands of waves of soldiers, first Southern recruits and then Union occupation troops, the people of the region faced the severest tests the Civil War could impose upon human beings. In The War Hits Home, Brian Steel Wills tells the story of these real people in the crucible of war. Reconstructing life for soldiers from the region on the battlefield and for civilians in the homes of southeastern Virginia, Wills provides a full depiction of what life was like for the ordinary person—black, white, soldier, citizen, Unionist, or secessionist—contending with domestic, economic, social, and military hardship in the contest of sectionalism and war. Wills employs their individual experiences to illustrate the impact of the war on a human scale, on soldiers and their relatives, North and South. We witness battlefield horror and family despair, African Americans' embrace of freedom, and the persistence of Confederate nationalism among most whites in the region. Taken as a whole, The War Hits Home is a sweeping but extraordinarily detailed canvas of a fractured American South.

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 this pathbreaking new work, Vitor Izecksohn attempts to shed new light on the American Civil War by comparing it to a strikingly similar campaign in South America—the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70, which galvanized four countries and became the longest large-scale international conflict in the history of the Americas. Like the Union in its conflict with the Confederacy, Brazil was faced with an enemy of inferior resources and manpower—in their case, Paraguay—that nonetheless proved extremely difficult to defeat. In both cases, the more powerful army had to create an elaborate war machine controlled by the central state to achieve victory. While it was not the official cause of either conflict, slavery weighed heavily on both wars. When volunteers became scarce, both the Union and Brazilian armies resorted to conscription and, particularly in the case of the Union Army, the enlistment of freedmen of African descent. The consequences of the Union’s recruitment of African Americans would extend beyond the war years, contributing significantly to emancipation and reform in the defeated South.Taken together, these two major powers’ experiences reveal much about state building, army recruitment, and the military and social impact of slavery. The many parallels revealed by this book challenge the assumption that the American Civil War was an exceptional conflict. A Nation Studies in the Civil War Era

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives not only of modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing towards a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war's wake.

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.

Offering a definitive account of the Democratic Party in the North, The Cacophony of Politics shows the limits of ideology and the ways the Civil War―and the nature of nineteenth-century political culture―confounded the Democrats’ self-image and exacerbated their divisions, especially over the central issue of slavery.A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

Between 1863 and 1871, Harriet M. Buss of Sterling, Massachusetts, taught former slaves in three different regions of the South, in coastal South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina. A white, educated Baptist woman, she initially saw herself as on a mission to the freedpeople of the Confederacy but over time developed a shared mission with her students and devoted herself to training the next generation of Black teachers. The geographical and chronological reach of her letters is uncommon for a woman in the Civil War era. In each place she worked, she taught in a different type of school and engaged with different types of students, so the subjects she explored in her letters illuminate a remarkably broad history of race and religion in America. Her experiences also offer an inside perspective of the founding of Shaw University, an important historically Black university. Now available to specialists and general readers alike for the first time, her correspondence offers an extensive view of the Civil War and Reconstruction era rarely captured in a single collection.

In Preserving the White Man's Republic, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War. Responding to fears of African American and female political agency, Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented themselves as "conservatives" and repurposed Jacksonian Democracy as a tool for local majorities of white men to police racial and gender boundaries by democratically withholding rights. With the policy of "popular sovereignty," Democrats left slavery's expansion to white men's democratic decision-making. They also promised white men local democracy and individual autonomy regarding temperance, religion, and nativism. Translating white men's household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color, Democrats united white men nationwide and made democracy a conservative assertion of white manhood. Democrats thereby turned traditional Jacksonian principles—grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism—into staples of conservatism. As Lynn's book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.

In April 1865, as the Civil War came to a close, Abraham Lincoln announced his support for voting rights for at least some of the newly freed enslaved people. Esteemed historian Paul Escott takes this milestone as an opportunity to explore popular sentiment in the North on this issue and, at the same time, to examine the vigorous efforts of Black leaders, in both North and South, to organize, demand, and work for their equal rights as citizens. As Escott reveals, there was in the spring of 1865 substantial and surprisingly general support for Black suffrage, most notably through the Republican Party, which had succeeded in linking the suffrage issue to the securing of the Union victory. This would be met with opposition, however, from Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, and, just as important, from a Democratic Party—including Northern Democrats—that had failed during the course of the war to shed its racism. The momentum for Black suffrage would be further threatened by conflicts within the Republican Party over the issue. Based on extensive research into Republican and Democratic newspapers, magazines, speeches, and addresses, Escott’s latest book illuminates the vigorous national debates in the pivotal year of 1865 over extending the franchise to all previously enslaved men—crucial debates that have not yet been examined in full—revealing both the nature and significance of growing support for Black suffrage and the depth of white racism that was its greatest obstacle.

The Young Americans were a nationalist movement within the Democratic Party made up of writers and politicians associated with the New York periodical, the Democratic Review. In this revealing book, Mark Power Smith explores the ways in which–in dialogue with its critics–the movement forged contrasting visions of American nationalism in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Frustrated, fifty years after independence, by Britain’s political and cultural influence on the United States, the Young Americans drew on a wide variety of intellectual authorities—in the fields of literature, political science, phrenology and international law—to tie popular sovereignty for white men to the universalist idea of natural rights. The movement supported a noxious program of foreign interventionism, racial segregation, and cultural nationalism. What united these policies was a new view of national allegiance: one that saw democracy and free trade not as political privileges but as natural rights for white men. Despite its national reach, this view of the Union inadvertently turned Northern and Southern states against each other, helping to cultivate the conditions for the Civil War. In the end, the Young America movement was ultimately consumed by the sectional ideologies it had brought into being.