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Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step—from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War—the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.
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Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny
Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step—from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War—the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.
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Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny

Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny

by Michael A. Morrison
Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny
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Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny

Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny

by Michael A. Morrison

Overview

Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step—from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War—the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807847961
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 08/30/1999
Edition description: 1
Pages: 416
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.92(d)
Lexile: 1450L (what's this?)

About the Author

Michael A. Morrison, coeditor of the Journal of the Early Republic, is associate professor of history at Purdue University.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. John Tyler's Hobby: Territorial Expansion and Jacksonian Politics
Chapter 2. Milton's Devil: Slavery Restriction and the Revolutionary Heritage, 1820-1846
Chapter 3. Washington Redux: The Whig Party and the Politics of Slavery, 1846-1848
Chapter 4. Tower of Babel: Social Ideology and the Crisis of Territorial Organization, 1848-1850
Chapter 5. Of Pegasus and Bellerophon: Popular Sovereignty, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
Chapter 6. A House Dividing: The Conspiracy Thesis Joined and Defined
Chapter 7. To the Egress: Humbug and the Disruption of the Democracy
Chapter 8. The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Disruption of the Second Party System
Conclusion: We Stand Where Our Fathers Stood
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Slavery and the American West shows in exhaustive detail just how the controversy over the expansion of slavery grew increasingly bitter and divisive until it provoked the departure of the lower South states in response to Lincoln's election in 1860 on a platform of containing slavery.—New York Review of Books



Morrison's vigorous, thoroughgoing examination of the slavery extension issue, along with his ringing assertion of its significance, will insure that the underlying drama at work in the political arena during the 1840s and 1850s will always be given its rightful place in future accounts of the coming of the Civil War.—Reviews in American History



Serious historians will find Morrison's book well worth reading. It captures the key events that led to civil war while superimposing them on a framework of western expansion.—Military Review



A strong book that is thoroughly and copiously documented. . . . Slavery and the American West brings a range of fresh insights that will help historians rethink the conceptual framework of antebellum politics.—Kansas History



A welcome study, a well-written authoritative work that provokes new answers to old but scarcely exhausted questions about the origins of America's greatest upheaval.—Slavery and Abolition



This book is a masterpiece. . . . Elegant, witty (mystery fans will note a good number of Sherlockian allusions), and learned, Slavery and the American West is the finest book written on the 1850s since David Potter's classic study of two decades past.—Civil War History



A thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned account of antebellum politics. . . . This book is an intellectual tour de force.—North Carolina Historical Review



Michael Morrison's important new book shows how expansionist appeals to the new nation's 'manifest destiny' at first subsumed and mitigated, but ultimately exacerbated sectional antagonisms. Slavery and the American West is a fresh and provocative contribution to our understanding of the process of party disorganization and sectional mobilization that brought the union to its final crisis.—Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia



This book is a masterpiece. . . . No historian who pretends to understand the sixteen-year countdown to Civil War will be able to ignore it.—Civil War History

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