audiobook Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (Viewpoints on American Culture) by From Jean H Baker in History

Description

William Lloyd Garrison argued--and many leading historians have since agreed--that the Constitution of the United States was a proslavery document. Garrison called it "a covenant with death; and an agreement with hell." But in The Slaveholding Republic; one of America's most eminent historians; Don E. Fehrenbacher; argues against this claim; in a wide-ranging; landmark history that stretches from the Continental Congress to the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Fehrenbacher ranges from sharp-eyed analyses of the deal-making behind the "proslavery clauses" of the constitution; to colorful accounts of partisan debates in Congress and heated confrontations with Great Britain (for instance; over slaves taken off American ships and freed in British ports). He shows us that the Constitution itself was more or less neutral on the issue of slavery and that; in the antebellum period; the idea that the Constitution protected slavery was hotly debated (many Northerners would concede only that slavery was protected by state law; not by federal law). Nevertheless; he also reveals that US policy--whether in foreign courts; on the high seas; in federal territories; or even in the District of Columbia--was consistently proslavery. The book concludes with a brilliant portrait of Lincoln. Fehrenbacher makes clear why Lincoln's election was such a shock to the South and shows how Lincoln's approach to emancipation; which seems exceedingly cautious by modern standards; quickly evolved into a "Republican revolution" that ended the anomaly of the United States as a "slaveholding republic." The last and perhaps most important book by a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian; The Slaveholding Republic illuminates one of the most enduring issues in our nation's history.