Reviews for The Political Crisis of the 1850s

The average rating for The Political Crisis of the 1850s based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-12 00:00:00 Robert Lawton Holt is a terrible writer and he fails to make the past come alive. However, his argument that the parties did not collapse due to the rising sectional crisis is well argued. The implication is that the fall of the parties made the sectional crisis worse. Holt never doubts that slavery was the central reason, but he avoids the monotony of other Civil War books that ignore other reasons in a pell-mell attempt to fight against the Lost Cause.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-16 00:00:00 Khigh Abner This dense look at the politics of the 1850's/lead-up to the Civil War provided precisely the context I was hoping it would. In the framework of this text, consider: -People get their news from an echo-chamber environment - propaganda rather than news. Things like a a building being torched in Missouri was loudly touted as proof of the violence that the slave-holding public would do to those against slaver and was referred to as a bloody massacre. There were 0 casualties. There were no major injuries. So the Republicans loudly and publicly drew in voters by exaggerating lies about fatalities. -Being a political outsider (literally, the "Know Nothings" back then) is seen by a sometimes radical majority as the only reasonable course of action -Rather than compete nationally, the Republicans chose to only put forth their candidate in one section of the country, choosing to let the other party/ies fight it out/weaken each other, thereby winning election with exclusively with a sectional coalition. -The fear of "Slave Power" (how the Republicans took power) was not, in fact, based on wholly altruist abolition. While there were indeed people who morally could not stand slavery, "Slave Power" was actually the fear in the North that, should slavery expand (as the aftermath of/reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska compromise proved), northerners would lose all economic and political power to the southern system with its lower labor costs. There is more - much more, in fact - but the conditions that led to the Civil War fire are being stoked by Republicans again. This text is a very interesting read when considering the lens of Trump voters and Bernie Supporters.