The Presidential Difference in the Civil War Era

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Chief Executive ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
James Buchanan ◽  
Mexican American War ◽  
Civil War Era

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.

What Difference Did the President Make?

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Chief Executives ◽  
James Buchanan ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Way

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”

Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Organizational Capacity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Personal Strengths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Leader ◽  
Policy Vision

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. This book assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. The book evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. The book looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, the book provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The book sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. The book reveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times—and what caused others to fail.

Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era.

1999 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 247
Author(s):  
Roberta Sue Alexander ◽  
Herman Belz
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Civil War Era

Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era

1979 ◽  
Vol 84 (5) ◽  
pp. 1479
Author(s):  
Richard O. Curry ◽  
Stephen B. Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
John Brown ◽  
Civil War Era

Pueblo, City, Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-47
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Financial Networks ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Mexican American War

This chapter explores how Los Angeles’s imperial aspirations at the end of the nineteenth century originated with figures such as Civil War veteran and diplomat William Rosecrans, who campaigned vocally for investors in Southern California to invest in Mexico and to tie the two regions together through financial networks. For context, it gives an overview of the Spanish empire in Los Angeles as well as the American ideology of Manifest Destiny that prompted the Mexican-American War. It then explores early investment connections between Los Angeles and Mexico through the figures of Rosecrans, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, Mexican diplomat Guillermo Andrade, and Mexican American Ignacio Sepúlveda. These individuals were instrumental in creating an investment and trade network based in Los Angeles and extending into Mexico as early as the 1870s. Many of these individuals also advocated for the creation of an “informal” American empire to facilitate investment in Mexico and the growth of Los Angeles.

Arguing until Doomsday

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Charles Sumner ◽  
Civil War Era

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 and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

The Bible in the Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Standard Mode ◽  
Civil War Era

Americans of the Civil War era expressed considerable certainty about how biblical passages applied to the dramatic contemporary events of 1861‒1865. Clergy, laypeople, and soldiers on both sides freely divined God’s purposes in history and suggested scriptures to back up their often apocalyptic prognostications. As with the battle for the Bible in the slavery controversy, however, the standard mode of biblical exegesis for mid-nineteenth-century Protestants, common-sense realism, provided such a plethora of answers about the meaning of contemporary events that there was no clear answer. The Bible did not speak plainly. More than just about any theologian or minister, Abraham Lincoln understood that and articulated it in 1865.

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