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Title details for Arguing until Doomsday by Michael E. Woods - Available

Arguing until Doomsday

Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy

by Michael E. Woods
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As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks’s frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois’s Stephen Douglas and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas’s fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era.
Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis’s factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party’s internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Civil War America

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 19, 2020

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9781469656410

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781469656403

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781469656403
      • File size: 3618 KB

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    Navigation

    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      March 1, 2020

      Abraham Lincoln once famously observed, about divisions over slavery that were threatening the Union, that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." According to historian Woods, so it was for the Democratic Party by the 1850s. In a major rereading of letters, speeches, and political propaganda of the time, Woods argues that the Democratic Party was fundamentally, and in the end fatally, wracked by different conceptions of the federal government's duty to provide special protections for slaveholders' human "property"--and the necessity of majority rule regarding settlers' rights concerning the protections and legality (if any) of slavery. These differences stood at the center of the personal and political distrust between Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas, with each beholden to local and sectional needs while seeking to control a national party. Woods places the personal and political dynamics of the time in historical context, showing that Douglas was a more complicated figure than records have shown. VERDICT This work speaks to the internal tensions within party organizations, the blinding force of ambition, and the ways distrust of democratic processes and institutions can destroy democracy itself. In that, it is a book for our time.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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  • Kindle Book
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  • English

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