The U.S. Structure and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy

5 months after the election of Abraham Lincoln, which had revealed the fracturing state of the nation, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter and the battle for the Union started in earnest. This documentary reader gives a firsthand take a look at the constitutional debates that consumed the nation in these fraught 5 months. Day-to-day, week by week, these paperwork chart the political path, and the insurmountable variations, that led straight—however not inevitably—to the American Civil Conflict.

At situation in these debates is the character of the U.S. Structure with regard to slavery. Editor Dwight Pitcaithley supplies professional steering by way of the speeches and discussions that passed off over Secession Winter (1860–1861)—in Congress, eleven state conventions, legislatures in Tennessee and Kentucky, and the Washington Peace Convention of February, 1861. The anthology brings to mild dozens of options to the secession disaster proposed within the type of constitutional amendments—90 % of them rigorously designed to guard the establishment of slavery in numerous methods all through the nation. And but, the e book suggests, secession solved neither of the South’s major considerations: the enlargement of slavery into the western territories and the return of fugitive slaves.

What emerges clearly from these paperwork, and from Pitcaithley’s incisive evaluation, is the centrality of white supremacy and slavery—particularly the concern of abolition—to the South’s resolution to secede. Additionally evident within the phrases of those politicians and statesmen is how totally ardour and concern, reasonably than cause and reflection, drove the choice making course of.