Academic literature on the topic 'Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 United States – History – Civil War, 1861-1865'

Introduction. The Civil War in the United States (1861–1865) has been of considerable interest to historians, lawyers, economists, and political scientists for more than 150 years. The internal political struggle that broke out in the middle of the 19th century between the two regions of the young democratic state seems to be a valuable object of research. However, scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the “inevitable conflict”, their transformation and rebirth depending on the historical period and the political situation are of even greater interest. This article attempts to summarize the main trends in the historiography of the causes of the Civil War in the United States, mainly in foreign historiography. Methods of research and materials. The methodological basis of the study was made up of general scientific and private scientific methods. The historical-legal, comparative method, as well as sociological, concrete-historical and systemic methods are used. The theoretical basis of the study was the work of mainly foreign historians, lawyers, political scientists and state historians. Analysis. Without denying the centrality of slavery among the causes of the Civil War, researchers identify religious, economic, political and social factors as the key determinants of the separatist movement in the South. A special place in American studies is occupied by the consideration of the role of African Americans in inciting conflict, the personality factor of A. Lincoln, as well as the influence of the abolitionist movement and journalists on the growing confrontation between the North and the South. At the same time, all directions, one way or another, boil down to the fact that it was slavery that was the fundamental cause of the Civil War. The peculiarities of the formation of each of the scientific directions were determined by the socio-economic and political conditions that took place in a particular historical period. Results. The periodization of scientific approaches to the study of the causes of the Civil War in the United States in the historical and legal literature can be carried out by dividing the research into three main periods: the “confrontational” (second half of the 19th century); the “socio-economic” (beginning – middle of the 20th century); the “industrial” (middle of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century). In the period from the beginning of the 21st century to the present, there is an obvious consensus on the central role of slavery among the determinants of war, but approaches to this problem in recent years have been characterized by interdisciplinarity, complexity, taking into account completely different sides of the conflict. Each of these areas has contributed to the formation of a holistic view of the causes of the Civil War, allowing us to realize the complex, multifaceted nature of the causes of the conflict and to reject two-dimensional approaches to their understanding. Key words: American Civil War, causes of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, slavery in the United States, the Missouri Compromise, abolitionists, history of the USA.

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.

Abstract The 2020 election raised fundamental questions about the future of American democracy. Although the Democratic presidential nominee Joseph Biden won a decisive victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote, President Donald Trump refused to accept defeat. For weeks after the election, Trump falsely claimed that Democrats had stolen the election. In an unprecedented step for a defeated incumbent president, he pressured Republican election officials and legislators to help him overturn the election results. Trump’s attacks on American democracy culminated on January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob invaded the United States Capitol Building to disrupt the Electoral Vote Count. In the aftermath of the 2020 election controversy, national polls found that over 90% of Americans believe that American democracy is in danger. Since the election, experts on both ends of the political spectrum have warned of the possibility of a full-fledged democratic breakdown in the United States. This article places America’s political crisis in historical context by examining the only democratic breakdown in the nation’s history: the Civil War. Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election, eleven southern states seceded from the Union. The conflict that ensued cost over half a million lives and left one-half of the United States in physical and economic ruin. This article makes three main points. First, a dispute over election rules did not cause the Civil War. Instead, the war resulted when the dominant political class in the South—slaveholders—rejected the principle of majority rule. American history thus demonstrates that even in the case of an election of unquestionable integrity, a disgruntled extremist minority might still break the country apart. Second, the slaveholders feared that if they put the issue of secession to a popular referendum, the non-slaveholding majorities in southern states might vote against it. To achieve their goal of destroying the Union, therefore, slaveholders dictated special rules for the secession votes in their states. After Lincoln’s election, southern state legislatures delegated the issue of secession to state conventions. Across the South, slaveholders manipulated the convention election rules to ensure the result they wanted: break-up of the federal union. Third, and finally, northerners viewed the war as a battle for the survival of democracy itself. They recognized that no democratically held election would ever be binding if losers could simply break free and form their own government. Northerners thus rallied around the Lincoln administration and supported the Union war effort through four bloody years of battle. The Union’s victory vindicated democracy as a form of government. The Confederacy’s crushing defeat in 1865 demonstrated that democracies could successfully navigate even the most extreme forms of civil disorder. Most important of all, the Civil War era gave rise to a dramatic expansion in the inclusiveness of American democracy. Ironically, therefore, the United States government emerged stronger in 1865 than it had been when the war began in 1861.

Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Although the main emphasis of this study is Lane and his part in the Republican Party, another important part to this thesis is the examination of Indiana and national politics in the 1850s. This thesis studies the development of the Hoosier Republican Party and the obstacles the young organization experienced as it transformed into a major political party. Party leaders generally focused on states like New York and Pennsylvania in national elections but Indiana became increasingly significant leading up to the 1860 election. Though Hoosier names like George Julian and Schuyler Colfax might be more recognizable nationally for their role in the Republican Party, this thesis argues that Lane played a guiding role in the development of the new third party in Indiana. Through the study of primary sources, it is clear that Hoosiers turned to Lane to lead the organization of the Republican Party and to lead it to its success in elections. Historians have long acknowledged Lane’s involvement in the 1860 Republican National Convention but fail to fully realize his significance in Indiana throughout the 1850s. This thesis argues that Lane was a vital leader in Hoosier politics and helped transform the Republican Party in Indiana from a grassroots movement into a powerful political party by 1860.

In the four decades leading up to the Civil War the United States maintained peaceful relations with Great Britain, the European power of greatest importance to Americans because of its maritime supremacy. At the same time, it increased its power in three ways. Its population grew. It expanded its territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean, incorporating Florida, Texas, and Oregon. Under the leadership of President James K. Polk it waged a victorious war against Mexico that ended with the acquisition of the territories that became the American Southwest. Meanwhile, the country’s economy grew rapidly. The dispute between the Northern and Southern States over slavery, which had been building since independence, culminated in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Led by President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant, the North won the war, thereby not only preserving the federal Union and abolishing slavery but also determining that the United States would be an industrial rather than an agrarian country and thus capable of becoming a great power.

Abstract After 1789, America’s early leaders, architects, and artists leveraged direct knowledge of classical antiquity (including the fable in Aesop that involved a fasces-like bundle of sticks), but also observed what individuals in Britain and France had made and were making of the emblem in the public sphere. Indeed, a major role in this iconographic effort was played by foreigners, culminating with Italian-born sculptor Enrico Causici (1790–1833), who was the first to introduce a representation of the fasces into the United States Capitol building (1817–1819). Starting in the early 1830s, escalating conflict over slavery raised questions about the long-term stability of the American union, and caused the fasces—now widely understood as the unity symbol par excellence—to proliferate, in everything from campaign broadsides to high art. By the mid-1850s, Southerners for their part seem to have regarded the fasces, especially when joined with a liberty cap, as promoting the abolitionist cause. Once actual civil war broke out between North and South in 1861, and especially after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, the emblem grew only more powerful as a marker of American union. Decades later, this understanding recommended the fasces to Adolph A. Weinman (1870–1952) for his design of the “Mercury” 10-cent piece first issued in 1916, and to the designers of the Lincoln Memorial (dedicated in 1922) in their tribute to the slain president who had preserved the United States.