BiblioVault - Books about 1845-1861

Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas

Allen C. Guelzo, with a Foreword by Michael Lind

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Despite the most meager of formal educations, Lincoln had a tremendous intellectual curiosity that drove him into the circle of Enlightenment philosophy and democratic political ideology. And from these, Lincoln developed a set of political convictions that guided him throughout his life and his presidency. This compilation of ten essays from Lincoln scholar Allen C. Guelzo uncovers the hidden sources of Lincoln’s ideas and examines the beliefs that directed his career and brought an end to slavery and the Civil War.

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Liberty Power

Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics

Corey M. Brooks

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power’s national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.

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Slavish Shore

The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Jeffrey L. Amestoy

Harvard University Press, 2015

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

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Stephen A. Douglas

Robert W. Johannsen

University of Illinois Press, 1997

      Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians
      For the quarter-century before 1860 Stephen A. Douglas was a dominant
        figure on the American political scene, far outshadowing Abraham Lincoln.
        This first paperback printing of Robert Johannsen's authoritative biography
        features a new preface.
      "At once a work of enormous scholarship and of deep insight. Here,
        for the first time, is the full story of a great career, told with such
        skill that we can now understand why Abraham Lincoln found the 'Little
        Giant' the most formidable political rival he ever faced." -- David
        H. Donald, author of Lincoln and two-time winner of the Pulitzer
        Prize
      "Well-organized and marvelously detailed. . . . The book demonstrates
        the virtues of large-scale, straightforward narrative biography at its
        best. Its completeness and objectivity will make it the standard authority
        for many years to come." -- Richard N. Current, The New York Times
        Book Review
      "Superb. . . . Will doubtless stand as the definitive biography
        of Stephen A. Douglas for this generation." -- Hans L. Trefousse,
        The Journal of American History
      "An impressive work--impressive in scope, in research, and in maturity
        of understanding. . . . Johannsen has constructed a biography that is
        rich in detail and full of conviction." -- James Z. Rabun, The
        Journal of Southern History
      "Should take its place in the tradition of magisterial biographies
        . . . in which so much of the best writing on American history is to be
        found." -- Harry V. Jaffa, National Review
      "The research is amazingly exhaustive and the writing is unusually
        readable. . . . Outstanding biography of a quality not often matched."
        -- LeRoy H. Fischer, Manuscripta
      Supported by the Dickerson Fund of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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