Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) - Hardcover

Furniss, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807182184 ISBN 13: 9780807182185

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln's administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments indeed the entire war effort depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss's Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war's radical outcomes.

About this title

About the Author

Jack Furniss is head of the history and politics department at an independent secondary school in London, England. He has graduate degrees in history from the University of Oxford and the University of Virginia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807182184
• ISBN 13: 9780807182185
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352