ABSTRACT
The American Civil War era continues to fascinate. Ken Burns’s recent TV documentary, shown in the United States and in Great Britain, was hugely popular and made riveting viewing. This reference book attempts to cover not only the military conflict itself, but other facets of the era – political, economic, constitutional, social, literary, religious – ignored or given scant coverage by most compilers. Starting in 1831, with the publication of Garrison’s abolitionist Liberator and Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia, and ending with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the book is held together by the central theme of emancipation and the quest for racial justice. In this, the war itself is vital, but has to be placed in the context of mid-nineteenth-century America where the roots of conflict lay within each individual’s choice on the stark moral question of freedom or slavery or, indeed, the conscious choice of complete indifference to the issue. It was Lincoln who accused Senator Douglas of caring not whether slavery be voted up or voted down; but that, too, was a moral choice. So the book finds room not only for Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Grant and Lee, but also the poet Emily Dickinson, for Albert Brisbane, the American apostle of utopian Fourierism, and John Stuart Mill, the English Liberal who championed the Northern cause.
