Download or read book The Internal Enemy Slavery and War in Virginia 1772 1832 written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Impressively researched and beautifully crafted…a brilliant account of slavery in Virginia during and after the Revolution." —Mark M. Smith, Wall Street Journal Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
Download or read book The Internal Enemy written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawn from new sources, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian presents a gripping narrative that recreates the events that inspired hundreds of slaves to pressure British admirals into becoming liberators by using their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war.
Download or read book Sons of the Fathers written by Erik S. Root and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Root's book, Sons of the Fathers explores the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831D1832, conducted in the House of Delegates. This is possibly the greatest debate to have occurred in any southern state before the Civil War. The speeches in this book provide, for the first time ever, an unedited version of that debate where many of the sons of America's Founders deliberated over the necessity of emancipating the slaves in Old Dominion. In August 1831, Nat Turner led the most successful slave rebellion in America's history, killing some 60 men, women, and children. This insurrection provided the historical backdrop to the proposal for a gradual emancipation plan. The forces for emancipation, led by Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, were defeated in the course of the debate as the members of the House of Delegates rejected that it was a necessity to free the slaves. As a result, rift between what is now Virginia and Western Virginia developed, never to heal. Some in the debates believed slaves had the same rights as every human being. Those who balked at emancipation diminished slavery as an 'evil' and came closer to the view that the slaves were mere property. They affirmed that the slave was property and rejected the natural rights grounding of the Founding. In this collection of primary source material-which consists of the speeches made public to the press and the people-the reader will be able to decide just how close the emancipation forces attached themselves to the 'laws of Nature and Nature's God.' The reader will also be able to decipher how far many Virginians departed from not only the Declaration of Independence, but the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
Download or read book The Divided Ground written by Alan Taylor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of William Cooper's Town comes a dramatic and illuminating portrait of white and Native American relations in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The Divided Ground tells the story of two friends, a Mohawk Indian and the son of a colonial clergyman, whose relationship helped redefine North America. As one served American expansion by promoting Indian dispossession and religious conversion, and the other struggled to defend and strengthen Indian territories, the two friends became bitter enemies. Their battle over control of the Indian borderland, that divided ground between the British Empire and the nascent United States, would come to define nationhood in North America. Taylor tells a fascinating story of the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution and the struggle of American Indians to preserve a land of their own.
Download or read book William Cooper s Town written by Alan Taylor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Cooper and James Fenimore Cooper, a father and son who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early years of the Republic, are brought to life in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. William Cooper rose from humble origins to become a wealthy land speculator and U.S. congressman in what had until lately been the wilderness of upstate New York, but his high-handed style of governing resulted in his fall from power and political disgrace. His son James Fenimore Cooper became one of this country’s first popular novelists with a book, The Pioneers, that tried to come to terms with his father’s failure and imaginatively reclaim the estate he had lost. In William Cooper’s Town, Alan Taylor dramatizes the class between gentility and democracy that was one of the principal consequences of the American Revolution, a struggle that was waged both at the polls and on the pages of our national literature. Taylor shows how Americans resolved their revolution through the creation of new social reforms and new stories that evolved with the expansion of our frontier.
Download or read book The Enemy Within written by Michael Thomas Smith and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-05-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In The Enemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals—including those involving John C. Frémont’s administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler’s in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton trade—to deeper anxieties. The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation’s wars and in every period of the nation’s history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats. In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens’ definitions of corruption manifested their specific fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners’ most cherished beliefs and values.
Download or read book Virginia in the War of 1812 written by Christopher M. Bonin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia saw significant action during the War of 1812, from the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair to the defense of Norfolk against British invaders. Many Virginians supported the struggle for independence from Great Britain—others vehemently opposed “Mr. Madison’s War.” A largely forgotten conflict, the war played an important role in the history of the United States. While comprehensive histories of the war are few, there is a positive lack of state-focused studies. Drawing on extensive primary and secondary sources, the author provides an in-depth portrait of the “Old Dominion” at war in the early years of the nation’s history.
Download or read book Thomas Jefferson s Education written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university. In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.
Download or read book All Honor to Jefferson written by Erik S. Root and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia's most prominent statesman had a profound influence on the American Founding. Of the first five presidents elected, four of them were Virginians. Old Dominion thus held an influential position in the Union. The Founders held a reluctant tolerance of slavery, yet every leading Founder believed that slavery was wrong. They based this argument on the natural rights all men, all humans, possessed. With a natural rights understanding of the American Founding, it is an inescapable conclusion that slavery is a violation of those rights. However, the Founders expressed their distaste of the peculiar institution in different ways. All wrote privately about their aversion of the institution, and some took unmistakable public positions. Several also found ways to demonstrate implicitly their opinion about slavery. Because of its influential position, the political direction of Old Dominion was a bellwether for the Union. During the 1829-1832, in two instances, Virginians debated the future of slavery in their state. First, in the Constitutional Convention in 1829-30 they debated the existence of natural rights and whether those rights were a guide for statesmanship. During this convention there was an attack on natural rights that set the stage for the next great deliberation over slavery. Second, they explicitly discussed ending slavery in the House of Delegates after the Nat Turner insurrection in 1831-32. The Delegates of the day rejected the emancipation of the slaves as a moral and political necessity. Virginians had the opportunity to place slavery on the road to gradual extinction. They had an opportunity to reaffirm the principles of liberty, but ultimately that argument lost. The forces of self-interest defeated those who articulated the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This was solidified when Thomas Roderick Dew wrote his review of the debates in the House of Delegates. As a result of his arguments, the pro-slavery argument proceeded apace in Virginia with Dew being instrument
Download or read book Virginia at War 1865 written by William C. Davis and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final volume in this comprehensive history of Confederate Virginia examines the end of the Civil War in the Old Dominion. By January 1865, most of Virginia's schools were closed, many newspapers had ceased publication, businesses suffered, and food was scarce. Having endured major defeats on their home soil and the loss of much of the state's territory to the Union army, Virginia's Confederate soldiers began to desert at higher rates than at any other time in the war, returning home to provide their families with whatever assistance they could muster. It was a dark year for Virginia. Virginia at War, 1865 presents a striking depiction of a state ravaged by violence and destruction. In the final volume of the Virginia at War series, editors William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. have once again assembled an impressive collection of essays covering topics that include land operations, women and families, wartime economy, music and entertainment, the demobilization of Lee's army, and the war's aftermath. The volume ends with the final installment of Judith Brockenbrough McGuire's popular and important Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War.
Download or read book Twice Condemned written by Philip J. Schwarz and published by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the history of enslaved African Americans' relationship with the criminal courts of the Old Dominion during a 160 year period.
Download or read book Civil War Ghosts of Virginia written by L. B. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of ghost stories from Virginia during the Civil War.
Download or read book Colonial America written by Alan Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents the current scholarly understanding of colonial America to a broader audience. He focuses on the transatlantic and a transcontinental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flows of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas.
Download or read book Black Patriots and Loyalists written by Alan Gilbert and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking history, Gilbert illuminates how the fight for abolition and equality - not just for the independence of the few but for the freedom and self-government of the many - has been central to the American story from its inception."--Pub. desc.
Download or read book Ending Slavery written by Kevin Bales and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-09-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "None of us is truly free while others remain enslaved. The continuing existence of slavery is one of the greatest tragedies facing our global humanity. Today we finally have the means and increasingly the conviction to end this scourge and to bring millions of slaves to freedom. Read Kevin Bales's practical and inspiring book, and you will discover how our world can be free at last."—Desmond Tutu "Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have congratulated themselves on ending slavery once and for all. But did we? Kevin Bales is a powerful and effective voice in pointing out the appalling degree to which servitude, forced labor and outright slavery still exist in today's world, even here. This book is a valuable primer on the persistence of these evils, their intricate links to poverty, corruption and globalization—and what we can do to combat them. He's a modern-day William Lloyd Garrison."—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves "I know modern slavery from the inside, and since coming to freedom I am committed to end it forever. This book shows us how to make a world where no more childhoods will be stolen and sold as mine was."—Given Kachepa, former U.S. slave, recipient of the Yoshiyama Award "Kevin Bales does not just pontificate from behind a desk. From the charcoal pits of Brazil to the brothels of Thailand, he has seen the victims of modern day slavery. In Ending Slavery, Bales gives us an update on what's happening (and not happening), and a controversial plan to abolish slavery in the 21st century. This is a must read for anyone who wants to learn about the great human rights issue of our times."—Ambassador John Miller, former director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
Download or read book American Republics A Continental History of the United States 1783 1850 written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.
Download or read book Jefferson s Empire written by Peter S. Onuf and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.
