Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Civil War America)

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Description

Traditional portrayals of politicians in antebellum Washington, D.C., describe a violent and divisive society, full of indignant debates and violent duels, a microcosm of the building animosity all through the country. Yet, in Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden paints a more nuanced portrait of Washington as a less fractious city with a vibrant social and cultural life. Politicians from different parties and sections of the country interacted in quite a lot of day by day activities outdoor traditional political spaces and came to know one any other on a personal level. Shelden shows that this engagement by figures such as Stephen Douglas, John Crittenden, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Stephens had essential consequences for how lawmakers dealt with the sectional disputes that bedeviled the country all the way through the 1840s and 1850s–particularly disputes involving slavery in the territories.
Shelden uses primary documents–from housing records to personal diaries–to reveal the ways in which this political sociability influenced how laws were made in the antebellum era. In the end, this Washington “bubble” explains why such a lot of of these men were unprepared for secession and war when the winter of 1860-61 arrived.

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