14. Editor quoted in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 71; Hitchcock quoted in Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 15.
15. CG, 29th Congress, 1st Session (May 11, 1846): 96; Emerson quoted in DeVoto, Year of Decision, 492.
16. “Sermon of War,” in Theodore Parker and Frances Power Cobbe, eds., Collected Works of Theodore Parker, Part Four (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004; first published in 1876), 4.
17. James K. Polk, “Special Message,” August 4, 1846, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
18. CG, 29th Congress, 1st Session (August 12, 1846): 1217.
19. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk during his Presidency, 1845 to 1849 (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), August 10, 1846, 2:75, available on Google Books; Boston Whig quoted in Robert F. Durden, The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 53.
20. Delano Quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 67–68; Toombs quoted in Schott, Stephens, 116.
21. Quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, 49.
22. Quoted in Eisenhower, So Far from God, 160.
23. William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Hammond, April 2, 1847, in Voices from the Gathering Storm: The Coming of the American Civil War, ed. Glenn M. Linden (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 24.
24. Quoted in Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 94.
25. All quotes in the preceding three paragraphs are from ibid., 150–51.
26. Frederick Douglass, “The Blood of the Slave on the Skirts of the Northern People,” North Star, November 17, 1848, in FD:SSW, 122–23.
27. The discussion of the gold rush draws on the following sources: Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Billington, Far Western Frontier, 218–41; H. W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (New York: Doubleday, 2002); DeVoto, Year of Decision, 499–500; Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000); Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 68–244.
28. James K. Polk, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 5, 1848, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
29. Unless otherwise noted, the discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charley relies on Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 190–92.
30. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Calvin Stowe, July 26, 1849, in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 119, available on Google Books.
CHAPTER 3: REVOLUTIONS
1. The discussion of the European revolutions of 1848 relies on Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2. Quoted in Philip Callow, From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 171; quoted in Timothy M. Roberts, “‘Revolutions Have Become the Bloody Toy of the Multitude’: European Revolutions, the South, and the Crisis of 1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Summer 2005): 263; see also Timothy M. Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Michael A. Morrison, “American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848–1852: Sectionalism, Memory, and the Revolutionary Heritage,” Civil War History 49 (June 2003): 111–32.
3. James K. Polk, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 5, 1848, James K. Polk Papers: American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
4. Quoted in Jack P. Greene, ed., The Ambiguity of the American Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 49–50.
5. For a full treatment of the Compromise of 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
6. Calhoun confided this to James M. Mason, senator from Virginia and a close friend. Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James Murray Mason (New York: Neale Publishing, 1906), 72–73.
7. CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session (March 4, 1850): 451–55.
8. Both quotes from Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 99.
9. Register of Debates, 21st Congress, 1st Session (January 27, 1830): 80.
10. CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session (March 7, 1850): 477.
11. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Ichabod” (1850), http://www.bartleby.com.
12. CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Appendix (March 11, 1850): 265.
13. Wooster Parker quoted in Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 178.
14. CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Appendix (July 22, 1850): 482.
15. Quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 121.
16. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, (New York: Macmillan, 1952), September 9, 1850, 2: 19–20.
17. Quoted in Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 183.
18. Both quotes from Schott, Stephens, 129.
19. S.L.C., “Isaac and Ishmael,” Southern Literary Messenger 17 (January 1851): 23.
20. Quoted in Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Vintage, 1983), 160.
21. These and subsequent quotes from the speech of Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” in FD:SSW, 188–205.
22. Walt Whitman, “Blood-Money,” initially appeared in the New York Daily Tribune, March 22, 1850, http://www.bartleby.com.
23. Unless otherwise noted, the discussion of Stowe relies on Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
24. Quoted in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Days of Judgment, Days of Wrath: The Civil War and the Religious Imagination of Women Writers,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 234.
25. Quoted in Andrew Delbanco, “Sentimental Education,” New Republic, April 18, 1994, 42.
26. Quoted in Fox-Genovese, “Days of Judgment,” 235.
27. Hedrick, Stowe, 104.
28. Quoted in ibid., 25.
29. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (New York: Norton, 1994; first published in 1852), 385.
30. Ibid., first quote, 247; second quote, 77.
31. Ibid., 385.
32. Ibid., first quote, 115; second quote, 357.
33. Ibid., first quote, 277; second quote, 340; third quote, 344.
34. Ibid., first quote, 249; second quotes, 246.
35. Ibid., 257.
36. Ibid., 383.
37. Ibid., 384.
38. Ibid., 385.
39. Ibid., 388.
40. Ibid.
41. First quote, Hedrick, Stowe, vii; second quote, Felix Gregory de Fontaine, History of American Abolitionism: Its Four Great Epochs (New York: D. Appleton, 1861), 53.
42. Quotes in Annie Fields, ed., Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 135, 136, available on Google Books.
43. Frederick Douglass to Harriet Beecher Stowe,
March 8, 1853, in FD:SSW, 216–17; Stowe quoted in Thomas Graham, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of Race,” New England Quarterly 46 (December 1973): 621.
44. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 4, 1853, in Voices from the Gathering Storm: The Coming of the American Civil War, ed. Glenn M. Linden (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 65.
45. “A Methodist,” Liberator, October 22, 1858; see also Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 114.
46. George Frederick Holmes, “Notices of New Work,” Southern Literary Messenger 18 (October 1852): 630.
47. George Frederick Holmes, “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Literary Messenger 19 (June 1853): 325.
48. Ibid., 329.
49. “Editor’s Table,” Southern Literary Messenger 19 (January 1853): 58.
50. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Eliza Cabot Follen, December 16, 1852, in The Limits of Sisterhood, ed. Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 178–80.
51. Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” January 27, 1838, CW 1:112.
CHAPTER 4: RAILROADED
1. Greeley quoted in Adam-Max Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New-York Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse,” Journal of American History 92 (September 2005): 494.
2. Quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 41.
3. William Edward Forster quoted in John Francis Maguire, Father Mathew: A Biography (New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1864), 383.
4. Quoted in Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991; first published in 1941 as Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1865), 84.
5. For this biographical material on Carl Schurz, I rely on Hans Trefousse’s biography.
6. For a discussion of this connection, see Gilbert Sykes Blakely, “Introduction,” Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1911).
7. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 103.
8. See John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
9. The following discussion relies on Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978); and Bruce C. Levine, “Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party,” Journal of American History 88 (September 2001): 455–88.
10. Quoted in Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 86.
11. Quoted in ibid., 220.
12. Henry A. Wise, “Governor Wise’s Letter on Know-nothingism and His Speech at Alexandria” (1854), YA Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress.
13. Quoted in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 185.
14. Biographical details come from Schott, Stephens.
15. Quoted in ibid., 27.
16. Quoted in ibid., 185, 186.
17. Quoted in Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 231.
18. Quoted in Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: Norton, 1997), 122.
19. First quote in Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 96; second quote in Levine, “Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery,” 477.
20. Quoted in Trefousse, Schurz, 50.
21. Quoted in Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 399.
22. Quoted in Robert R. Russel, Improvement of Communication with the Pacific Coast as an Issue in American Politics, 1783–1864 (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1948), 25.
23. First quote in Johannsen, Douglas, 405; second quote in James L. Huston, Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 105; third quote in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 160.
24. CG, 33rd Congress, 1st Session (January 24, 1854): 281–82.
25. “Slavery Militant,” New York Tribune, January 11, 1854.
26. Quoted in William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 557.
27. CW 2:130.
28. CW 2:255.
29. First quote in CW 2:282; second quote in CW 2:248.
30. Quoted in Johannsen, Douglas, 422.
31. CW 2:281, 266.
32. CW 2:546.
33. CW 2:255, 266.
34. CW 2:242.
35. Speech at Chicago, October 30, 1854, in FD:SSW, 310.
36. New York Tribune, January 11, 1854; Atchison quoted in Louis A. De Caro Jr., “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 217.
CHAPTER 5: BLOOD ON THE PLAINS
1. The discussion on the Plains Indians in this chapter benefited particularly from the following works: Colin G. Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996); Arrell Morgan Gibson, The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1980); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); Joseph M. Marshall III, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History (New York: Penguin, 2004); Mike Sajna, Crazy Horse: The Life Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000); Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1820–1890 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990); Richard White, “It’s your misfortune and none of my own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
2. Quoted in Weeks, Farewell, 63.
3. Both quotes in Marshall, Journey of Crazy Horse, 34.
4. Quoted in Sajna, Crazy Horse, 91.
5. Quoted in George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 98; see also Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 89–96.
6. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on their Economy (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 18, available on Google Books; William C. Daniell, “Southern Agricultural Congress,” Southern Literary Messenger 18 (October 1852): 616.
7. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York: C. M. Saxton, Barker, 1860). Letter 13: “Lo! the Poor Indian!” http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/roughingit/map/indgreeley.html.
8. See Marshall, Journey of Crazy Horse, 39–46, for additional details on this episode.
9. Quotes are from Sajna, Crazy Horse, 109, 110.
10. Quoted in ibid., 111.
11. Quoted in ibid., 118.
12. Quoted in ibid., 119.
13. Seward and Rhett quoted in Robert F. Durden, The Self-Inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 69; Atchison quoted in Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 2006), 236.
14. New York Tribune, May 28, 1856.
15. CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix (June 21, 1856): 641.
16. “The Political Aspect,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 8 (July 1856): 89.
17. Quoted in Timothy M. Roberts, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Antebell
um Violence in Kansas,” Journal of the West 44 (Fall 2005): 66.
18. Quoted in ibid., 67.
19. CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix (May 19, 1856): 530.
20. Ibid. (May 20, 1856): 543.
21. New York Tribune, May 23, 1856.
22. Edgefield (S.C.) Advertiser, May 28, 1856, http://history.furman.edu/editorials/see.py?ecode=sceasu560528a.
23. Quoted in Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 205.
24. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003; first published in 1892), 195.
25. Ibid., 194.
26. Quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 222.
27. De Bow, “The War Against the South—Opinions of Freesoilers and Abolitionists, Their Denunciations, etc.,” De Bow’s Review 21 (September 1856): 271–72, 276.
28. Ibid., 274.
29. Ibid., 276.
30. CW, 2:322, 341.
31. Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 205.
32. Quoted in Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 258.
33. Quoted in Schott, Stephens, 208.
34. Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 315.
35. Alexander K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1902), 357.
36. Quoted in Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 260, 262.
37. Quoted in ibid., 260.
38. Quotes in Durden, Self-Inflicted Wound, 171, 172.
39. Quotes in Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 263, 264.
40. Quoted in ibid., 268.
41. Quoted in ibid., 269.
42. Quoted in Guelzo, Redeemer President, 206.
43. Quoted in William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 442.
CHAPTER 6: REVIVAL
1. The definitive work on the Revival is Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
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