The Reader's Companion to American History
1248
The Reader's Companion to American History
1248eBook
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Overview
From the origins of its native peoples to its complex identity in modern times, this unique alphabetical reference covers the political, economic, cultural, and social history of America.
A fact-filled treasure trove for history buffs, The Reader’s Companion is sponsored by the Society of American Historians, an organization dedicated to promoting literary excellence in the writing of biography and history. Under the editorship of the eminent historians John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, a large and distinguished group of scholars, biographers, and journalists—nearly four hundred contemporary authorities—illuminate the critical events, issues, and individuals that have shaped our past. Readers will find everything from a chronological account of immigration; individual entries on the Bull Moose Party and the Know-Nothings as well as an article on third parties in American politics; pieces on specific religious groups, leaders, and movements and a larger-scale overview of religion in America.
Interweaving traditional political and economic topics with the spectrum of America’s social and cultural legacies—everything from marriage to medicine, crime to baseball, fashion to literature—the Companion is certain to engage the curiosity, interests, and passions of every reader, and also provides an excellent research tool for students and teachers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547561349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1248 |
| Sales rank: | 915,589 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A
ABLEMAN V. BOOTH
This Supreme Court case in 1859 asserted the supremacy of federal law and federal courts over the states. It also showed the depth of northern abolitionists' anger over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision and the lengths to which they would go in their fight against the peculiar institution.
In 1854, abolitionist editor Sherman M. Booth was arrested for violating the Fugitive Slave Act when he helped incite a mob to rescue a black fugitive from Wisconsin federal marshal Stephen V. R. Ableman. Booth appealed to the state supreme court, which ruled the federal law unconstitutional and ordered Booth's release. When Ableman turned to the federal courts, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed Booth's release and again declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional.
The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. According to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion, state courts had no power to review or interfere with federal laws. Taney still was anathema to the North for his actions in the Dred Scott case two years before. But the Supreme Court, although it was divided along sectional lines, was unanimously opposed to this use of John C. Calhoun's doctrine of nullification, even though it had been invoked by northern antislavery forces for purposes completely opposed to Calhoun's.
See also Abolitionist Movement; Nullification Controversy.
ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT
From the 1830s until 1870, the abolitionist movement attempted to achieve immediate emancipation of all slaves and the ending of racial segregation and discrimination. Their propounding of these goals distinguished abolitionists from the broad-based political opposition to slavery's westward expansion that took form in the North after 1840 and raised issues leading to the Civil War. Yet these two expressions of hostility to slavery — abolitionism and Free-Soilism — were often closely related not only in their beliefs and their interaction but also in the minds of southern slaveholders who finally came to regard the North as united against them in favor of black emancipation.
Although abolitionist feelings had been strong during the American Revolution and in the Upper South during the 1820s, the abolitionist movement did not coalesce into a militant crusade until the 1830s. In the previous decade, as much of the North underwent the social disruption associated with the spread of manufacturing and commerce, powerful evangelical religious movements arose to impart spiritual direction to society. By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person's responsibility to uphold God's will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism as well as to such other reforming crusades as temperance, pacifism, and women's rights. By the early 1830s, Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually nourished by revivalism, had taken up the cause of "immediate emancipation."
In early 1831, Garrison, in Boston, began publishing his famous newspaper, the Liberator, supported largely by free African-Americans, who always played a major role in the movement. In December 1833, the Tappans, Garrison, and sixty other delegates of both races and genders met in Philadelphia to found the American Anti-Slavery Society, which denounced slavery as a sin that must be abolished immediately, endorsed nonviolence, and condemned racial prejudice. By 1835, the society had received substantial moral and financial support from African-American communities in the North and had established hundreds of branches throughout the free states, flooding the North with antislavery literature, agents, and petitions demanding that Congress end all federal support for slavery. The society, which attracted significant participation by women, also denounced the American Colonization Society's program of voluntary gradual emancipation and black emigration.
All these activities provoked widespread hostile responses from North and South, most notably violent mobs, the burning of mailbags containing abolitionist literature, and the passage in the U.S. House of Representatives of a "gag rule" that banned consideration of antislavery petitions. These developments, and especially the 1837 murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, led many northerners, fearful for their own civil liberties, to vote for antislavery politicians and brought important converts such as Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and Edmund Quincy to the cause.
But as antislavery sentiment began to appear in politics, abolitionists also began disagreeing among themselves. By 1840 Garrison and his followers were convinced that since slavery's influence had corrupted all of society, a revolutionary change in America's spiritual values was required to achieve emancipation. To this demand for "moral suasion," Garrison added an insistence on equal rights for women within the movement and a studious avoidance of "corrupt" political parties and churches. To Garrison's opponents, such ideas seemed wholly at odds with Christian values and the imperative to influence the political and ecclesiastical systems by nominating and voting for candidates committed to abolitionism. Disputes over these matters split the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, leaving Garrison and his supporters in command of that body; his opponents, led by the Tappans, founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Meanwhile, still other foes of Garrison launched the Liberty party with James G. Birney as its presidential candidate in the elections of 1840 and 1844.
Although historians debate the extent of the abolitionists' influence on the nation's political life after 1840, their impact on northern culture and society is undeniable. As speakers, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Lucy Stone in particular became extremely well known. In popular literature the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell circulated widely, as did the autobiographies of fugitive slaves such as Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and Solomon Northrup. Abolitionists exercised a particularly strong influence on religious life, contributing heavily to schisms that separated the Methodists (1844) and Baptists (1845), while founding numerous independent antislavery "free churches." In higher education abolitionists founded Oberlin College, the nation's first experiment in racially integrated coeducation, the Oneida Institute, which graduated an impressive group of African-American leaders, and Illinois's Knox College, a western center of abolitionism.
Within the Garrisonian wing of the movement, female abolitionists became leaders of the nation's first independent feminist movement, instrumental in organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Although African-American activists often complained with reason of the racist and patronizing behavior of white abolitionists, the whites did support independently conducted crusades by African-Americans to outlaw segregation and improve education during the 1840s and 1850s. Especially after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, white abolitionists also protected African-Americans threatened with capture as escapees from bondage, although blacks themselves largely managed the Underground Railroad.
By the later 1850s, organized abolitionism in politics had been subsumed by the larger sectional crisis over slavery prompted by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Most abolitionists reluctantly supported the Republican party, stood by the Union in the secession crisis, and became militant champions of military emancipation during the Civil War. The movement again split in 1865, when Garrison and his supporters asserted that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery made continuation of the American Anti-Slavery Society unnecessary. But a larger group led by Wendell Phillips, insisting that only the achievement of complete political equality for all black males could guarantee the freedom of the former slaves, successfully prevented Garrison from dissolving the society. It continued until 1870 to demand land, the ballot, and education for the freedman. Only when the Fifteenth Amendment extending male suffrage to African-Americans was passed did the society declare its mission completed. Traditions of racial egalitarianism begun by abolitionists lived on, however, to inspire the subsequent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.
Blanche Glassman Hirsh, The Feminist Abolitionists (1978); Benjamin Quarles, The Black Abolitionists (1970); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1986).
James Brewer Stewart
See also American Colonization Society; Civil War; Dred ScottCase; Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment; Free-Soil Party; Fugitive Slave Law; Gag Rule; Kansas-Nebraska Act;Liberty Party; Quakers; Radicalism; Republican Party; Second Great Awakening; Slavery; Underground Railroad; and entries for individual abolitionists.
ABORTION
Abortion has been practiced in the United States since the founding of the Republic, but both its social character and its legal status have varied considerably. Through the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans regarded abortion primarily as the recourse of women wronged by duplicitous suitors or pregnant as the result of illicit relationships, though records exist of married women having abortions. Americans tolerated the practice, which had long been legal under colonial common law and remained legal under American common law, provided the pregnancy was terminated before quickening: the first perception of fetal movement by the woman. Quickening generally occurs near the midpoint of gestation.
As married women moved to lower their fertility rates after 1830, abortion became a widespread practice in the United States. Abortionists advertised in the daily press and pharmaceutical firms competed in a lucrative market of purported abortifacients. Women spoke to each other and to their doctors in straightforward terms about their abortions. When physicians estimated American abortion rates in the 1860s and 1870s, they used figures strikingly close to those of the 1960s and 1970s: approximately one abortion for every four live births.
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century several state legislatures began to restrict the increasingly common practice of abortion. Some lawmakers feared for the safety of women undergoing abortions. Others reacted negatively to what they considered indecent advertising. Concerned about falling birthrates, many opposed all forms of fertility control, not just abortion. But the greatest pressure for legal change came from the American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847.
Led by Horatio Robinson Storer, a Boston physician, the AMA and its affiliated medical societies worked in state capitals throughout the nation during the 1860s and 1870s to outlaw abortion at any stage of gestation, except when doctors themselves determined the procedure to be necessary. Though the physicians put forward scientific, social, and moral arguments, their professional aspirations to upgrade and regulate American medical practice also loomed large. The legal status of abortion was altered by state legislatures after the Civil War not in a religious context but in the context of who would be allowed to do what to whom in the practice of medicine.
The antiabortion laws and legal decisions of the second half of the nineteenth century, though seldom and selectively enforced, drove the practice of abortion underground. Substantial numbers of women, especially immigrant women with limited access to other (also illegal) methods of fertility control, nonetheless continued to have abortions. Surveys conducted under the auspices of the AMA and the federal government confirmed the persistence of widespread abortion in the United States through the 1930s.
By the late 1950s significant portions of the population began to call for repeal of the regulations that proscribed abortion. Nineteenth-century concerns about female health had been undermined by reliable data demonstrating that early abortions under proper conditions were actually safer than normal births. Nineteenth-century alarms about the dwindling national birthrate had been replaced by twentieth-century fears of overpopulation. Nineteenth-century commitments to life of any sort under any conditions were being questioned as a result of heightened sensitivities to what was called the quality of life. Even so, three additional factors stood out.
First was a profound shift in the role of American women. Abortion had always been a women's issue, but not until the 1960s did significant numbers of women address it in an overtly public and political fashion. Control over their own reproductive processes, including the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, became for many women one of the fundamental demands of modern feminism. Second was a perception of inequality. While the wealthy and well connected arranged discreet abortions under favorable conditions, the poor and the unsophisticated often suffered. Third was an almost complete reversal of opinion within the medical establishment. By 1967, according to a national survey, 87 percent of American doctors favored liberalization of the antiabortion laws that their professional predecessors had fought to enact a century earlier.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several states moved to modify or repeal their antiabortion statutes. In the legislative battles of that period, however, and in countless legal and political confrontations since, the antiabortion laws of the nineteenth century found vehement modern defenders. Foremost among the latter was the Roman Catholic church, which denounced abortion under any circumstances. Several fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants agreed, as did a diverse coalition of other Americans, including some concerned about the dramatically shifting public and political role of American women and many uneasy with what they considered to be deteriorating moral standards on many fronts. Whereas most Americans in the nineteenth century had considered early abortion on a continuum with contraception, these twentieth-century groups considered abortion at any point in gestation a form of murder.
In January 1973 the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade ruled that women, as part of their constitutional right to privacy, could choose to terminate a pregnancy prior to the point at which the fetus reached a stage of development that would allow it to survive outside the womb. This ruling, and its subsequent refinements, effectively struck antiabortion laws from state criminal codes and returned the United States, in a rough sense, to standards functionally similar to those of the early Republic.
After the Roe decision, abortion became a divisive and intensely emotional public issue. One side applauded and defended the decision; the other sought to reverse it altogether or to undercut it severely by the application of restrictions or principles they considered transcendent in this matter. Both houses of Congress divided on the issue. The Hyde Amendment of 1976, passed over a presidential veto and sustained by the federal courts, essentially eliminated federal funding for abortions. Members of Congress opposed to the practice blocked foreign aid to programs alleged to be tolerant of abortion in other countries. Federal judicial nominees were questioned closely by both sides about their views on abortion.
As debate over abortion intensified during the 1980s, both sides strengthened their national organizations. One side emphasized each woman's right to make reproductive decisions for herself; the other emphasized the right to life of the unborn. When a challenge to the Roe decision came before the Supreme Court in 1989, hundreds of thousands of citizens from both sides demonstrated and counterdemonstrated in the streets of Washington, D.C., in an effort to influence public and judicial opinion. That case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, also generated a record-breaking number of friend-of-the-court briefs, as organizations of many sorts sought to place their views about abortion before the justices.
(Continues…)
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