A House Divided: Slavery and American Politics from the Constitution to the Civil War by Ben McNitt
A House Divided: Slavery and American Politics from the Constitution to the Civil War by Ben McNitt
A House Divided narrates slavery's continuous influence on American political life from the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The story captures the part that the development of the doctrine of white supremacy played throughout the period -- from a straight shot of racism in the white North to the white South's more elaborate cocktail of historical, biblical, and economic justifications of Black bondage. Thoroughly researched yet told at a crisp journalistic pace, this book draws from decades of recent scholarship that has recast the modern understanding of slavery. Thomas Jefferson is presented in a conflicted rather than iconic role, but his articulation of universal human equality is the through-line to Abraham Lincoln's defense of America's abiding first principle. The record is a violent one, from slave revolts to plantation whippings and murders, to the (blood-stained) fields of Bleeding Kansas to John Brown's murderous assault at Harper's Ferry.
Americans who made America -- the great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster; the Moses of her people Harriet Tubman; the women who worked in the fields of abolition as the teaching ground of an equal rights movement that lives today -- their stories and those of their contemporaries are told in these pages. No other single work recounts this epic story as comprehensively and accessibly as does A House Divided.
Stackpole Books, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 2021
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.