Between Extremes
Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North
Published on 6. November 2024
338 pages
978-0-8071-8311-3 (ISBN)
Description
Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln's administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments-indeed the entire war effort-depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss's Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war's radical outcomes.
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11/2024
Louisiana State University Press
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10/2024
Louisiana State University Press
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Person
Jack Furniss is head of Politics and teacher of history at Wimbledon High School in London, England. He has graduate degrees in history from the University of Oxford and the University of Virginia.
Content
- COVER
- CONTENTS
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INTRODUCTION: A Story of the Middle
- CHAPTER ONE: Centrist Roots in Antebellum Politics, 1856-1860
- CHAPTER TWO: A Conservative Consensus, 1861
- CHAPTER THREE: Radicals Rebuked, 1862
- CHAPTER FOUR: Military Necessity and the Rise of the Copperheads, 1863
- CHAPTER FIVE: A Conservative Revolution, 1864
- CONCLUSION: Could the Center Hold?
- NOTES
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX
