Arguing until doomsday : Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the struggle for American democracy

Summary:

"As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis['s] and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era"-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9781469656397 (hardcover)
ISBN: 1469656396 (hardcover)
Physical Description: 338 pages ; 25 cm.
Publisher: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Introduction -- Western men -- Jackson men -- Manifest destinies -- Down to the crossroads -- Wages of whiteness -- Rule or ruin -- Epilogue, countries over party -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.