Böcker av Daniel W. Crofts

In 1861, as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the Union and prevent war, Abraham Lincoln offered to accept a constitutional amendment that barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the slave states. Daniel Crofts unearths the hidden history and political manoeuvring behind the stillborn attempt to enact this amendment.

Daniel Crofts examines Unionists in three pivotal southern states - Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee - and shows why the outbreak of the war enabled the Confederacy to gain the allegiance of these essential, if ambivalent, governments.

Nat Turner's 1831 slave insurrection made Virginia's Southampton County notorious. Old Southampton links local and national history. It explains how partisan loyalties developed, how white democracy flourished in the late antebellum years, how secession sharply divided neighbourhoods, and how former slaves challenged the prerogatives of former slaveholders.

Originally published in 1942, this perceptive and impartial analysis of one of the most baffling periods in American history, the months between the election of Lincoln and the fall of Fort Sumter, was a bold declaration of intellectual independence.