A History of the American People

giving Pierce a landslide in the electoral college, though his plurality over all the other candidates (there were four vote-spl ...

land strategy of the South. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who had helped Clay to draft the 1850 Compromise, was now chair ...

some others rushed into Pottawatomie Creek, a pro-slavery settlement, and slaughtered five men in cold blood. By the end of the ...

slaver, William H. Seward (1801-72), as too extreme, and picked John Charles Fremont (1813- 90), a South Carolina adventurer who ...

the demand for slaves. Southerners argued that by resuming the slave trade the cost of slaves in America would be sharply reduce ...

made it unlawful to teach slaves to read and write. In any event, small white farmers in the South were very much at the mercy o ...

their own cause and moral detestation of the attitudes of their opponents. And the leaders on both sides were righteous men. Let ...

indeed he saved an Indian from being butchered. He was the first man to refer to Indians as Native Americans,' though in the the ...

The Lincolns had four sons. Generations of Lincoln-admirers have played down the role of Mary in his life and career, easily fin ...

That Lincoln, as his wife implied, had a huge will when intellectually roused to a moral cause is clear. This sprang from a comp ...

wretch at his heels, haunted Lincoln. He wept for the South in its self-inflicted moral degradation. It was because slavery made ...

other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in th ...

always accepted it-as a convenient or inescapable fact-but they did not want it spelled out. To do so sounded amoral or even imm ...

claims but Lincoln had a big success in New York. At the Republican State convention in Decatur, Lincoln's cousin John Hanks did ...

positions and exercise influence. Emerson noticed a certain tenderness in the people, not before remarked.' As he put it,The you ...

Southerners, in their fear and fury, accused the Northern Democrats of betraying them by failing to present slavery to the North ...

kind of corporal punishment, and the boy was cosseted by big sisters, and taught riding by his adoring big brothers, three of wh ...

I have no fear of insurrection, no more dread of our slaves than I have of our cattle ... Our slaves are happy and contented.' N ...

and former father-in-law, General Taylor, saw action at Monterrey and Buena Vista, and distinguished himself in both these much ...

South in the 1950s, Davis was urging in the 1850s. But slavery repelled capital and white skilled labor alike, and Southerners t ...