The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War

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Oxford University Press, 17.09.1981 - 320 Seiten
A collection of essays by a master historian. Amongst the subjects that Stampp tackles are the inevitability of the Civil War and the truth about why the confederacy actually died. The other essays are a mix of historiography and analysis of issues including Lincoln's role in reinforcing Fort Sumter, the impact of psychology in trading slaves, and the role of racism in the Republican Party.

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The Concept of a Perpetual Union
3
The Search for
39
A Humanistic Perspective
72
Race Slavery and the Republican Party
105
The Republican National Convention of 1860
136
Lincoln and the Secession Crisis
163
The Irrepressible Conflict
191
The Southern Road to Appomattox
246
Notes
271
Index
309
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Seite 133 - That is the issue that will continue in this country, when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles— right and wrong— throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same...
Seite 128 - I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races...
Seite 176 - In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it.
Seite 5 - Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774.
Seite 253 - Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth. that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.
Seite 28 - That the United States form, for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation, has not yet been denied. In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people. In many other respects, the American people are one; and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests, in all these respects, is the government of the Union.
Seite 12 - I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
Seite 29 - America has chosen to be, in many respects, and to many purposes, a nation ; and for all these purposes her government is complete ; to all these objects it is competent.
Seite 15 - Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression...

Autoren-Profil (1981)

A native of Milwaukee, Kenneth Stampp received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1941 and then taught at the University of Arkansas and the University of Maryland. In 1945 he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently Morrison Professor Emeritus of American History. Stampp has served as Harmsworth Professor at Oxford, Commonwealth Lecturer at the University of London, Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich, and visiting professor at Harvard University and Colgate University and Williams College. A past president of the Organization of American Historians, in 1993 he received the Lincoln Prize from the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. Stampp touched off a revolution in the study of slavery with the publication of The Peculiar Institution (1956), which vigorously refutes the long-prevailing Dunning-Phillips interpretation and demolishes a host of myths about the master-slave relationship. His further works on the sectional conflict and its causes established him as a leading authority on that subject as well.

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