Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War

ISBN-13: 9780195315929 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 256 str.

Joel H. Silbey

Opis

In the spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union. This hard-fought and bitter controversy profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, it marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear.
Silbey, one of America's most renowned political historians, offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, which included an exceptional cast of characters, from John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, to James K. Polk and Martin Van Buren. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces. After Texas statehood, it became a driving force in national affairs, ultimately leading to Southern secession and Civil War.
With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"--and a pivotal moment in American history.

Recenzje

"Thomas Jefferson may have heard a 'firebell in the night' when Missouri applied for statehood, but veteran political historian Silbey's cogent analysis suggests that Texas created an even greater crisis two decades later, one that fundamentally altered American party politics, spreading sectional passions more deeply and pervasively than ever before. His work clarifies and sharpens our understanding of how sectional forces played out in politics to bring about a civil war." —Phyllis F. Field, Associate Professor of History, Ohio University

O autorze

Joel H. Silbey is President White Professor of History at Cornell University. One of the leading historians of American politics in the decades before the Civil War, he is the author of Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War, and Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics. He is the Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University for 2004-2005.