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Author: William Dusinberre Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019992418X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
James Polk was President of the United States from 1845 to 1849, a time when slavery began to dominate American politics. Polk's presidency coincided with the eruption of the territorial slavery issue, which within a few years would lead to the catastrophe of the Civil War. Polk himself owned substantial cotton plantations-- in Tennessee and later in Mississippi-- and some 50 slaves. Unlike many antebellum planters who portrayed their involvement with slavery as a historical burden bestowed onto them by their ancestors, Polk entered the slave business of his own volition, for reasons principally of financial self-interest. Drawing on previously unexplored records, Slavemaster President recreates the world of Polk's plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. Startlingly, Dusinberre shows how Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. Shortly before his sudden death from cholera, the president quietly drafted a new will, in which he expressed the hope that his slaves might be freed--but only after he and his wife were both dead. The very next day, he authorized the purchase, in strictest secrecy, of six more very young slaves. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But Dusinberre suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery-- influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system-- may actually have helped precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.
Author: William Dusinberre Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019992418X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
James Polk was President of the United States from 1845 to 1849, a time when slavery began to dominate American politics. Polk's presidency coincided with the eruption of the territorial slavery issue, which within a few years would lead to the catastrophe of the Civil War. Polk himself owned substantial cotton plantations-- in Tennessee and later in Mississippi-- and some 50 slaves. Unlike many antebellum planters who portrayed their involvement with slavery as a historical burden bestowed onto them by their ancestors, Polk entered the slave business of his own volition, for reasons principally of financial self-interest. Drawing on previously unexplored records, Slavemaster President recreates the world of Polk's plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. Startlingly, Dusinberre shows how Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. Shortly before his sudden death from cholera, the president quietly drafted a new will, in which he expressed the hope that his slaves might be freed--but only after he and his wife were both dead. The very next day, he authorized the purchase, in strictest secrecy, of six more very young slaves. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But Dusinberre suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery-- influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system-- may actually have helped precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.
Author: Garry Wills Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 9780618485376 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
In 1800 Thomas Jefferson won the presidential election with Electoral College votes derived from the three- fths representation of slaves -- slaves who could not vote but were still partially counted as citizens. Moving beyond the recent revisionist debate over Jefferson"s own slaves and his relationship with Sally Hemings, Garry Wills instead probes the heart of Jefferson"s presidency and political life, revealing how the might of the slave states remained a concern behind his most important policies and decisions. Jefferson"s foil was Thomas Pickering, who along with the Federalists fought the president and the institutions that supported him. In an eye-opening, ingeniously argued expose, Wills restores Pickering and his allies" dramatic struggle to our understanding of Jefferson, the creation of the new nation, and the evolution of our representative democracy.
Author: Amy S. Greenberg Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0804173443 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
The little-known story of remarkable First Lady Sarah Polk—a brilliant master of the art of high politics and a crucial but unrecognized figure in the history of American feminism. While the Women’s Rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman in Washington, D.C. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings Sarah’s story into vivid focus. We see Sarah as the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to discuss politics and business with men; we see the savvy and charm she brandished in order to help her brilliant but unlikeable husband, James K. Polk, ascend to the White House. We watch as she exercises truly extraordinary power as First Lady: quietly manipulating elected officials, shaping foreign policy, and directing a campaign in support of America’s expansionist war against Mexico. And we meet many of the enslaved men and women whose difficult labor made Sarah’s political success possible. Sarah Polk’s life spanned nearly the entirety of the nineteenth-century. But her own legacy, which profoundly transformed the South, continues to endure. Comprehensive, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable insight, Lady First is a revelation of our twelfth First Lady’s complex but essential part in American feminism.
Author: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 113700018X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army in the Civil War. He died a free man in northwest Washington at 75. Based on correspondence, legal documents, and journal entries rarely seen before, this amazing portrait of the times reveals the mores and attitudes toward slavery of the nineteenth century, and sheds new light on famous characters such as James Madison, who believed the white and black populations could not coexist as equals; French General Lafayette who was appalled by this idea; Dolley Madison, who ruthlessly sold Paul after her husband's death; and many other since forgotten slaves, abolitionists, and civil right activists.
Author: David W. Blight Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 9780156034517 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.
Author: Walt Bachman Publisher: ISBN: 9781794376380 Category : Languages : en Pages : 158
Book Description
In The Last White House Slaves, Walt Bachman relates the never-before-told story of how President Zachary Taylor fathered at least one child -- a son, William -- with his household slave Jane. In the decades before the Civil War, Taylor and hundreds of other U.S. Army officers became slavekeepers by manipulating the army's unique pay system, which rewarded them for keeping slaves as private servants. Relying on a previously uncited collection of thousands of army pay records stored in the National Archives, Bachman reveals how army officers, with the full knowledge of their superiors in Washington, helped spread slavery throughout the country. Taylor, a Mexican-American War hero who was elected president in 1848, took his slaves, including Jane, to forts in free territories, Mexican-American War outposts, and the White House. After he died in office in 1850, Jane continued to serve the Taylor family and was eventually freed by Lincoln's District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862.
Author: G. Holden Pike Publisher: DigiCat ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 83
Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "From Slave to College President" (Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington) by G. Holden Pike. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Author: Mary V. Thompson Publisher: ISBN: 9780813941844 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"American historians began producing in-depth studies of slavery and slave life shortly after World War II, but it was not until the early 1980s that the country's museums took the first tentative steps to interpret those same controversial topics. Perhaps because of the tremendous amount of primary material related to George Washington, almost no one looked into the lives of Mount Vernon's enslaved population. Incorporating the results of detailed digging, of both the archaeological and archival varieties, the number of chapters grew as further questions arose. While a few scholars outside Mount Vernon turned their attention to Washington's changing ideas about slavery, they largely overlooked the daily lives of those who were enslaved on the estate, a subject about which visitors expressed a desire to know more. The resulting book makes use of a wide range of sources, including letters, financial ledgers, work reports, travel diaries kept by visitors to Mount Vernon, the reminiscences of family members, former slaves, and neighbors, reports by archaeologists, and surviving artifacts to flesh out the lives of a people who left few written records, but made up 90 percent of the estate's population. The book begins with a look at George and Martha Washington as slaveowners, before turning to various facets of slave life ranging from work, to family life, housing, foodways, private enterprise, and resistance. Along the way, readers will see a relationship between Washington's military career and his style of plantation management, learn of the many ways slaves rebelled against their condition, and get to know many of the enslaved people who made Mount Vernon their home"--
Author: Kenneth C. Davis Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 1627793119 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
"An examination of American slavery through the true stories of five enslaved people who were considered the property of some of our best-known presidents"--
Author: William Wells Brown Publisher: Graphic Arts Books ISBN: 1513276107 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
Born into slavery, Clotel is a white-passing woman who conceals her identity and uses a disguise to infiltrate a plantation to rescue her loved ones. It’s a story of survival that’s deeply rooted in the cruelest part of American history. Clotel and Althesa are the illegitimate daughters of Thomas Jefferson and a slave woman named Currer. Despite their father’s elite status, the girls are sold into slavery but attempt to use their fair complexions to their advantage. Clotel takes it a step further, dressing as a white man to emancipate her daughter who was sold against her will. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an American tragedy that explores generational trauma. William Wells Brown, who’s considered the first African American novelist, uses his personal experience to illustrate the horrors of bondage. It’s a heartbreaking tale that tests the undeniable power of the human spirit. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is both modern and readable.
Author: William Dusinberre
Author: William Dusinberre
Author: Garry Wills
Author: Amy S. Greenberg
Author: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Author: David W. Blight
Author: Walt Bachman
Author: G. Holden Pike
Author: Mary V. Thompson
Author: Kenneth C. Davis
Author: William Wells Brown