Arguing Until Doomsday by Michael E Woods

Arguing Until Doomsday by Michael E Woods

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

Speaks to the internal tensions within party organizations, the blinding force of ambition, and the ways distrust of democratic processes and institutions can destroy democracy itselfIn that, it is a book for our time.--Library Journal

Even readers who find the Civil War or politics boring could find this well-written narrative gripping. It helps especially now for readers needing to escape the present. All this solid but entertaining history really lacks for is background music.--New York Journal of Books

This impressive new book . . . deftly recovers the dynamism and disagreements that animated, and ultimately destroyed, the Democratic Party on the eve of the Civil War. . . . Diligently researched, closely argued, and clearly written, Arguing Until Doomsday is an essential book for students of antebellum politics and the road to Civil War.--Civil War News

Woods has written one of the most engaging and accessible histories of the pre-Civil War Democratic Party to date. . . . [Arguing Until Doomsday] advances the field of American political history and affords nuance to a period that is always in danger of becoming oversimplified.--The Civil War Monitor

Michael E. Woods is associate professor of history at Marshall University and author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9781469656397
ISBN 10	1469656396
Titel	Arguing Until Doomsday
Autor	Michael E Woods
Serie	Civil War America
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	The University of North Carolina Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2020-04-30
Seitenanzahl	352
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar