Full Description

1858

"Highly recommended–a gripping narrative of the critical year of 1858 and the nation's slide toward disunion and war. Chadwick is especially adept at retelling the intense emotions of this critical time, particularly especially in recounting abolitionist opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jefferson Davis's passionate defense of this institution. For readers seeking to understand how individuals are agents of historical change will find Chadwick's account of the failed leadership of President James Buchanan, especially compelling."

-G. Kurt Piehler, author of “Remembering War the American Way” and Associate Professor of History, The University of Tennessee

1858 explores the events and personalities of the year that would send the America’s North and South on a collision course culminating in the slaughter of 630,000 of the nation’s young men, a greater number than died in any other American conflict. The record of that year is told in seven separate stories, each participant, though unaware, is linked to the oncoming tragedy by the central, though ineffective, figure of that time, the man in the White House, President James Buchanan.

The seven figures who suddenly leap onto history’s stage and shape the great moments to come are: Jefferson Davis, who lived a life out of a Romantic novel, and who almost died from herpes simplex of the eye; the disgruntled Col. Robert E. Lee, who had to decide whether he would stay in the military or return to Virginia to run his family’s plantation; William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the great Union generals, who had been reduced to running a roadside food stand in Kansas; the uprising of eight abolitionists in Oberlin, Ohio, who freed a slave apprehended by slave catchers, and set off a fiery debate across America; a dramatic speech by New York Senator William Seward in Rochester, which foreshadowed the civil war and which seemed to solidify his hold on the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination; John Brown’s raid on a plantation in Missouri, where he freed several slaves, and marched them eleven hundred miles to Canada, to be followed a year later by his catastrophic attack on Harper’s Ferry; and finally, Illinois Senator Steven Douglas’ seven historic debates with little-known Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois Senate race, that would help bring the ambitious and determined Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States.

As these stories unfold, the reader learns how the country reluctantly stumbled towards that moment in April 1861 when the Southern army opened fire on Fort Sumter.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Author to Reader

Chapter One: The White House, New Year’s Day, 1858
Chapter Two: The Death of Jefferson Davis
Chapter Three: The White House, Early 1858:One Year of Dred Scott
Chapter Four: Colonel Robert E. Lee Leaves -the Military Forever
Chapter Five: The White House, February 1858:Showdown with Stephen Douglas
Chapter Six: Honest Abe and the Little Giant:The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Part One
Chapter Seven: The White House, July 1858 -
Chapter Eight: Honest Abe and the Little Giant:The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Part Two
Chapter Nine: The White House, Autumn 1858:The Forney Feud
Chapter Ten: Oberlin, Ohio: The Rescuers
Chapter Eleven: The White House, October 1858
Chapter Twelve: William Seward:The “Irrepressible Conflict”
Chapter Thirteen: The White House, Election Day
Chapter Fourteen: William Tecumseh Sherman:Dead-Ended
Chapter Fifteen: The White House, Winter 1858:Swashbuckling in the Americas
Chapter Sixteen: Terrible Swift Sword:John Brown’s Christmas Raid into Missouri
Chapter Seventeen: The White House, December 1858

Epilogue
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt from Chapter 1: The White House, New Year’s Day, 1858

The year 1858 could not have started in a grander fashion than it did on January 1 in Washington, DC. The New Year arrived on a cold but sunny day. It was welcomed with parties and receptions all over the nation’s capital. The Republicans and Democrats who had fought so bitterly throughout 1857 over the slavery issue put aside their differences and mingled with each other at the homes of the country’s political leaders. One of the most well-attended receptions took place at the home of Vice President John Breckinridge, a thirty-seven-year-old former Kentucky slaveholder and rising political star. Another party was hosted by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, James Orr. Several cabinet members flung open the doors of their homes for guests invited to similar receptions. Senators and congressmen, such as Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, John Slidell of Louisiana, William Bigler of Pennsylvania, and George Pugh of Ohio, held lavish soirées. The most important public figures in public life attended these parties, wearing their best suits and hats. They were accompanied by their wives, dressed in fashionable gowns and adorned in expensive jewelry.

Continuing a tradition, President James Buchanan, in office just under a year, hosted a three-hour reception at the White House for members of the diplomatic corps, Democratic members of the Senate and House, and political friends on the morning of New Year’s Day. Guests arrived at the White House just before eleven o’clock in the morning and remained until the middle of the afternoon. There were several hundred of them and they came in a continuous parade of elegant carriages. At noon, the front doors of the White House were opened to the public to meet the president. Thousands of ordinary people walked into the executive mansion, many for the very first time, all impressed with its size. After a lengthy wait in a receiving line, they met President Buchanan, who wished them all a Happy New Year.

The atmosphere at the president’s New Year’s reception was jovial and most of the conversation between the fifteenth president and his guests did not involve the issue of slavery that seemed about to overwhelm America. Everyone was grateful for that. The year 1857 had been difficult. A recession that sent financial markets reeling in the past year still crippled the dollar, weakened the banks, and hurt the import/export trade. Unemployment was up, factories shut their doors, the federal government ran a deficit, the public staged runs on banks, and financially pressed banks could not meet their specie payments.2 Hinton Helper’s book, The Impending Crisis of the South, highly critical of Southerners and slavery that was published during the previous year, was still the central topic of many conversations. At the end of the year, politicians in the Kansas Territory, eager to bring it into the Union as a state, had sent Congress not one, but two state constitutions, one recognizing slavery and one not, for a decision. Three congressmen were forced to resign during the year following a corruption scandal connected to the 1856 campaign.

In addition, Buchanan sent an army of twenty-five hundred men on an ill-advised expedition to Utah to put down what he described as an uprising of Mormons; the result was a debacle that included an attack by Indians on the troopers, the burning of army supply wagon trains, destruction of crops and homes to deny the army food, and lengthy journeys through snow¬bound mountain passes by the army across what one trooper described as “the most desolate country I have ever beheld.”3 The expedition was a humiliation of the army and the administration.

An illegal slave ship jammed with six hundred captives, possibly headed for America, was intercepted off the coast of Africa in a well-publicized seizure at the end of November, and its capture was followed by reports of other slave vessels that had secretly made it to the United States.

An American adventurer, William Walker, led a coup against the govern¬ment of Nicaragua and seized control of the country, only to be deposed by the forces of neighboring nations.

And all across the nation, controversy still raged over the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, handed down in March of 1857, in which the high court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act, reappealed the Missouri Compromise of 1850, decided that Congress could not declare any territory free, and ruled that slaves were not people, but property. And, on top of all that, the population of America continued to explode, increasing by nearly 25 percent over the last decade.

No one was happier to move forward and put 1857 behind him than President James Buchanan. The president was an odd-looking man. He was tall and heavy-set, with a mop of curly white hair. He had had throat and nasal growths surgically removed, but the operations, primitive in the era, left large and ugly scars on his neck. He also suffered from myopic vision that forced him to bend his head severely to the left and forward in order to read, further exposing the huge scars he tried to hide with very high shirt collars. His vision caused him to squint severely whenever he read something or tried to look out over a crowded room, further adding to his unusual appearance. One of his eyes was brown and the other hazel. His forward-leaning head also misled many into thinking he agreed with what they said. He was a big man, but oddly had tiny feet that he bragged about to everyone he met.

Buchanan had arrived in Washington as the victor in a close presidential race in 1856 in which he was the nominee of a disorganized and overly confident Democratic Party that found itself fighting for its life at the polls against the fiery new Republicans, who had replaced the defunct Whigs, and the zealots of the American Party, who mounted a strong third-party challenge. Buchanan had carried nineteen of the forty-one states and won the election with 59 percent of the electoral vote, but the Republicans surprised everyone. Their presidential nominee, explorer John C. Fremont, won eleven states. Fremont had earned the nickname “the Pathfinder” following his five well-publicized expeditions through the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains over the previous decade. A third-party candidate, former president Millard Fillmore, a sectional candidate running on the ticket of the American Party (an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant group formerly called the “Know-Nothings”), captured one state.
Buchanan earned 45 percent of the popular vote, giving up 30 percent to Fremont and 25 percent to Fillmore. If Fillmore had carried several Southern states and denied Buchanan the election, or forced it into the House of Representatives, Fremont would have come close to winning the election outright. Buchanan won his home state, Pennsylvania, by just 577 votes out of nearly 500,000 cast, and Indiana by less than 2,000 out of 235,000. He only earned 105,528 votes in Illinois, 44.1 percent, against 130,306 cast against him, but was awarded the state’s eleven electoral votes because his two opponents split that larger ballot. Even Buchanan was forced to admit that the loss of just two states would have given Fremont the White House.

Reviews

Reviews

Armchair Reviews Jeff Foster
1858
by Bruce Chadwick
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Reviewed by Jeff Foster

There are years in our history that have become the defining periods of events that they preclude. 1858 is one such year.

In his new book 1858, Bruce Chadwick brings to print the defining year in our nation history. In many ways this particular year is not known for what great things were done, but for things that could have been done, but were not.

Chadwick details the political environment of the year in such a way as to provide the reader with a “well that explains that” moment in regards to the cataclysmic events that would take place in the United States of America in the thirty-six short months that followed.

Abraham Lincoln was an unknown state politician in Illinois; Robert E. Lee was facing the largest challenges of his life keeping his family’s land holding together. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecusah Sherman were near destitution. Jefferson Davis nearly died. Yet these men and many others would rise to the forefront of American history in the following two years and shape our country into what it has become today.

1858 was the year of the Kansas/Missouri border clashes, John Brown, and the first year the Republican Party won election in any major political battle. Political infighting between Stephen Douglas and President James Buchanan, indirectly leading to Abraham Lincoln’s election win in 1860, leaving Buchanan with the legacy of being the most naïve and least effective president in the history of our country. If not for Buchanan’s unethical double-dealings, lack of focus on America’s internal troubles and contemptible lack of leadership, the Civil War may not have taken place.

Author Chadwick is to be commended. 1858 is a true literary gem in the American History genre. It should be read by every citizen and shared with generations to come–lest we not forget our mistakes.

Armchair Interviews says: If you love American History, this book is a necessary addition to your library.

From our armchair to yours...

Curled Up with a Good Book Alexander Camden
Bruce Chadwick’s 1858 does a magnificent job of exploring hitherto unknown elements of the conditions that led up to the Civil War, including but not limited to the recalcitrant President James Buchanan. Had he not resided in his own private bubble and actually paid attention to the state of the nation instead of running the country as if he were the only one who knew anything (sounds disturbingly like our current situation), the war likely could have been avoided.

Chadwick examines and describes Lincoln, Davis, Sherman, Lee, Grant, William Seward, John Brown and Stephen Douglas with such vivid imagery that readers can actually see the participants. Some rarely seen photographs are included in this informative yet moving book, the most poignant one being of John Brown kissing a black infant while on his way to his lynching.

While no single one of the protagonists or antagonists, depending on your point of view, can solely be blamed for the war that tore the nation asunder, there certainly are more than the usual suspects who must shoulder a portion of the blame.

1858 is fascinating and moves at a surprisingly quick clip without getting bogged down in the minutiae of other historic tomes. For anyone who wants to learn more about the causes and the opportunities to avoid the Civil War that were either unrecognized or deliberately ignored, this book is a gem.

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Trade Paper Specfications

• Length: 9.00 in
• Width: 6.00 in
• Height: 6.00 in
• Weight: 6.00 oz
• Page Count: 368 pages