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America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink

Amazon.com Price:  $22.95 (as of 06/05/2019 06:46 PST- Details)

Civil War
History
Military History

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Description

It was once a year packed with unsettling events. The Panic of 1857 closed every bank in New York City, ruined thousands of businesses, and caused widespread unemployment among industrial workers. The Mormons in Utah Territory threatened rebellion when federal troops approached with a non-Mormon governor to replace Brigham Young. The Supreme Court outraged northern Republicans and abolitionists with the Dred Scott decision (“a breathtaking example of judicial activism”). And when a proslavery minority in Kansas Territory tried to foist a proslavery constitution on a large antislavery majority, President Buchanan reneged on a an important commitment and supported the minority, a disastrous miscalculation which in the long run split the Democratic party in two.
In America in 1857, eminent American historian Kenneth Stampp offers a sweeping narrative of this eventful year, covering the entire major crises whilst providing readers with a vivid portrait of The usa at mid-century. Stampp gives us a fascinating account of the attempt by William Walker and his band of filibusters to triumph over Nicaragua and make it a slave state, of crime and corruption, and of street riots by urban gangs such as New York’s Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys and Baltimore’s Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs. But the focal point continually returns to Kansas. He examines the outrageous political frauds perpetrated by proslavery Kansans, Buchanan’s calamitous response and Stephen Douglas’s break with the President (a rare event in American politics, a major party leader repudiating the president he helped elect), and the whirl of congressional votes and dramatic debates that led to a settlement humiliating to Buchanan–and devastating to the Democrats.
1857 marked a turning point, at which sectional conflict spun out of regulate and the country moved swiftly toward the final violent resolution in the Civil War. Stampp’s intensely focused look at this pivotal year illuminates the forces at work and the mood of the nation as it plummeted toward disaster.
Civil War
History
Military History
Americas

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