Examines the Northern opposition to the abolition of slavery in the 1830's, and the public disorders caused by this protest

"Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Richards, Leonard L.

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

Richards' study presents not only a vivid portrait of John Quincy Adams but also provides an insightful exploration of American politics in the 1830s and 40s. Examining one of the few presidents who sustained a political career after his term in the White House, Richards depicts how two years after losing the presidential election to Andrew Jackson, Adams ran for the House of Representatives and served there until his death seventeen years later. During his outstanding congressional career, Adams became a folk hero in much of the North--hailed by some as "Old Man Eloquent" and "the conscience of New England" by others--while much of the South feared him, regarding him as a traitor and the "archest enemy of slavery that ever existed." Richards explores in detail Adams' battles with such prominent figures as Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster on the issues of slavery, the Indians and their land, the annexation of Texas, and the potential war against Mexico. Highlighting his importance in the anti-slavery movement, Richards reassesses Adams' role as a political analyst and as a vital force in the turbulent politics of the day.

The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation may have been limited―freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines―but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln’s leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment. The real story, however, is much more complicated―and dramatic―than that. With Who Freed the Slaves?, distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards tells the little-known story of the battle over the Thirteenth Amendment, and of James Ashley, the unsung Ohio congressman who proposed the amendment and steered it to passage. Taking readers to the floor of Congress and the back rooms where deals were made, Richards brings to life the messy process of legislation―a process made all the more complicated by the bloody war and the deep-rooted fear of black emancipation. We watch as Ashley proposes, fine-tunes, and pushes the amendment even as Lincoln drags his feet, only coming aboard and providing crucial support at the last minute. Even as emancipation became the law of the land, Richards shows, its opponents were already regrouping, beginning what would become a decades-long―and largely successful―fight to limit the amendment’s impact. Who Freed the Slaves? is a masterwork of American history, presenting a surprising, nuanced portrayal of a crucial moment for the nation, one whose effects are still being felt today.

Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment

History

Americas

University of Chicago Press

It has always been understood that the 1848 discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada influenced the battle over the admission of California to the Union. But now, in this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards makes clear the links between the Gold Rush and many of the regional crises in the lead-up to the Civil War. Richards explains how Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves and saw themselves importing their own slaves to dig for gold, only to be frustrated by California’s passage of a state constitution that prohibited slavery. Still, they schemed to tie California to the South with a southern-routed transcontinental railroad and worked to split off the southern half as a separate slave state. We see how the Gold Rush influenced the squabbling over the Gadsden Purchase, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and various attempts to take Cuba and Nicaragua. We meet David Broderick, a renegade New York Democrat who became a force in San Francisco politics in 1849, and his archrival William Gwin, a major Mississippi slaveholder and politician who arrived in California with the intent of making it a slave state and himself one of its first senators. Richards recounts the Washington battles involving Taylor, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Davis, Webster, Fillmore, and others, as well as the fiery California political battles, feuds, duels, and perhaps outright murder as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two. When war did break out efforts were made to push California to secede, but there was little general enthusiasm for secession, and many prominent Southerners went off to join the Confederate Army. And with the South out of the Union, the Pacific Railroad Act passed, insuring a comfortably northern route.

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War

KNOPF

Award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards gives us an authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of the terrible battle that was to come.
When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Americans of all stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by 50 percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)

Reference

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the American national government and used their power to ensure the extension of slavery. Later termed the Slave Power theory, this idea was no mere figment of a lunatic fringe’s imagination. It was, as Leonard L. Richards shows in this innovative reexamination of the Slave Power, endorsed at midcentury by such eminent and circumspect men as Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, the editors and owners of the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, and the president of Harvard College. With The Slave Power, Richards reopens a discussion effectively closed by historians since the 1920s―when the Slave Power theory was dismissed first as a distortion of reality and later as a manifestation of the “paranoid style” in the early Republic―and attempts to understand why such reputable leaders accepted this thesis wholeheartedly as truth and why hundreds of thousands of voters responded to their call to arms. Through incisive biographical cameos and narrative vignettes, Richards explains the evolution of the Slave Power argument over time, tracing the oft-repeated scenario of northern outcry against the perceived slaveocracy, followed by still another “victory” for the South: the three-fifths rule in congressional representation; admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820; the Indian removal of 1830; annexation of Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1847; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and more. Richards probes inter- and intraparty strategies of the Democrats, Free-Soilers, Whigs, and Republicans and revisits national debates over sectional conflicts to elucidate just how the southern Democratic slaveholders―with the help of some northerners―assumed, protected, and eventually lost a dominance that extended from the White House to the Speaker’s chair to the Supreme Court. The Slave Power reveals in a direct and compelling way the importance of slavery in the structure of national politics from the earliest moments of the federal Union through the emergence of the Republican Party. Extraordinary in its research and interpretation, it will challenge and edify all readers of American history.

The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780--1860

LSU Press

During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule. But despite the immediate failure of this local call-to-arms in the Massachusetts countryside, the event fundamentally altered the course of American history. Shays and his army of four thousand rebels so shocked the young nation's governing elite—even drawing the retired General George Washington back into the service of his country—that ultimately the Articles of Confederation were discarded in favor of a new constitution, the very document that has guided the nation for more than two hundred years, and brought closure to the American Revolution.
The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully appreciated, chiefly because Shays and his followers have always been viewed as a small group of poor farmers and debtors protesting local civil authority. In Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, Leonard Richards reveals that this perception is misleading, that the rebellion was much more widespread than previously thought, and that the participants and their supporters actually represented whole communities—the wealthy and the poor, the influential and the weak, even members of some of the best Massachusetts families.
Through careful examination of contemporary records, including a long-neglected but invaluable list of the participants, Richards provides a clear picture of the insurgency, capturing the spirit of the rebellion, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.

Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle

University of Pennsylvania Press

During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule. But despite the immediate failure of this local call-to-arms in the Massachusetts countryside, the event fundamentally altered the course of American history. Shays and his army of four thousand rebels so shocked the young nation's governing elite—even drawing the retired General George Washington back into the service of his country—that ultimately the Articles of Confederation were discarded in favor of a new constitution, the very document that has guided the nation for more than two hundred years, and brought closure to the American Revolution.
The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully appreciated, chiefly because Shays and his followers have always been viewed as a small group of poor farmers and debtors protesting local civil authority. In Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, Leonard Richards reveals that this perception is misleading, that the rebellion was much more widespread than previously thought, and that the participants and their supporters actually represented whole communities—the wealthy and the poor, the influential and the weak, even members of some of the best Massachusetts families.
Through careful examination of contemporary records, including a long-neglected but invaluable list of the participants, Richards provides a clear picture of the insurgency, capturing the spirit of the rebellion, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.

This study enhances our understanding of this place in the political and cultural history of the mid nineteenth century. Put simply, Van Buren played a critical role in the emergence of the post 1840 anti-slavery controversy that culminated in the coming of the Civil War. And Lindenwald also witnessed during these years the emergence of changes in labor and gender relations affecting the nation generally. As the authors of the report write, "new scholarship on farming in the mid-Hudson Valley, on domestic architecture and landscape, on labor and gender, reveal Lindenwald to be a complex place that witnessed political and personal dramas both large and small."

A Return to His Native Town: Martin Van Buren's Life at Lindenwald, 1839-1862

Miller, Marla R.

Gilg, Erik

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richards, Leonard L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Richards, Leonard L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richards, Leonard L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

"Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America

The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams

Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War

The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)

The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780--1860

Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle

Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle

A Return to His Native Town: Martin Van Buren's Life at Lindenwald, 1839-1862