Slavery and the American West : the eclipse of manifest destiny and the coming of the Civil War
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step -- from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War-the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition
Print Book, English, ©1997
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, ©1997
History
xii, 396 pages ; 25 cm
9780807823194, 9780807847961, 0807823198, 0807847968
34912654
John Tyler's hobby: territorial expansion and Jacksonian politics
Milton's devil: slavery restriction and the revolutionary heritage, 1820-1846
Washington redux: the whig party and the politics of slavery, 1846-1848
Tower of Babel: social ideology and the crisis of territorial organization, 1849-1850
Of Pegasus and Bellerophon: popular sovereignty, Stephen A. Douglas, and the origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
A house dividing: the conspiracy thesis joined and defined
To the egress: humbug and the disruption of the democracy
The eclipse of manifest destiny and the disruption of the second party system