A LSO BY S IDNEY B LUMENTHAL
Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 18491856
A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 18091849
The Strange Death of Republican America
How Bush Rules
The Clinton Wars
This Town (play)
Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War
The Reagan Legacy (Editor with Thomas Byrne Edsall)
Our Long National Daydream: A Pageant of the Reagan Years
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power
The Permanent Campaign
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Copyright 2019 by Sidney Blumenthal
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2019
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Interior design by Joy OMeara
Jacket design by Jackie Seow
Jacket photograph from Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-7728-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-7731-3 (ebook)
For John Ritch and Christina Ritch
TIMELINE OF MAJOR EVENTS
March 4, 1853: | Inauguration of Franklin Pierce as president |
May 30, 1854: | Kansas-Nebraska Act passes the Congress |
October 4, 1854: | Lincoln speaks against the Kansas-Nebraska Act at the Illinois House of Representatives |
February 8, 1855: | Lincoln, the Whig candidate for the U.S. Senate, recognizes he lacks the votes in the state legislature to win, and throws his support to the antislavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull to defeat the pro-Douglas candidate |
August 16, 1855: | Andrew Reeder, the first territorial governor of Kansas, removed by President Pierce for his objections to fraudulent elections |
September 28, 1855: | New York Republican Party created out of fusion of Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers |
October 7, 1855: | John Brown arrives in Kansas |
October 23, 1855: | Free state settlers meet at Topeka to adopt a constitution banning slavery in the territory, elect a governor, and designate Andrew Reeder its congressional delegate |
November 1855: | Wakarusa War in Kansas between free state and proslavery forces |
December 25, 1855: | Christmas dinner at Maryland home of Francis P. Blair to found the national Republican Party |
February 22, 1856: | The Know Nothing Party, or American Party, nominates former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate |
February 22, 1856: | First national convention of the Republican Party takes place at Pittsburgh |
February 22, 1856: | Lincoln writes the platform at a meeting of antislavery editors at Decatur as the founding document of the Illinois Republican Party and calls for its first convention |
March 12, 1856: | Stephen A. Douglas submits his report on Kansas to the Senate |
May 1920 1856: | Charles Sumner delivers his speech to the Senate, The Crime Against Kansas |
May 21, 1856: | Missouri Ruffians led by former senator David Rice Atchison sack the Kansas free state capital of Lawrence |
May 22, 1856: | Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina canes Charles Sumner in the Senate |
May 2425, 1856: | John Brown and his men murder five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie, Kansas |
May 29, 1856: | Lincoln delivers his Lost Speech as the keynote of the founding convention of the Illinois Republican Party |
June 6, 1856: | James Buchanan defeats Stephen A. Douglas at the Democratic Party national convention to win nomination as the presidential candidate |
June 19, 1856: | John C. Frmont nominated as the first Republican Party presidential candidate; Lincolns name put into nomination for vice president but loses to William Dayton, a former U.S. senator from New Jersey |
November 4, 1856: | James Buchanan elected president |
March 4, 1857: | Inauguration of James Buchanan as president |
March 6, 1857: | Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issues decision in the Dred Scott case |
June 12, 1857: | Douglas defends the Dred Scott decision in a speech at Springfield |
June 15, 1857: | Fraudulent election in Kansas elects proslavery delegates to a constitutional convention |
June 26, 1857: | Lincoln assails the Dred Scott decision in a speech at Springfield, declaring of the captive slave, All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. |
August 24, 1857: | The Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company collapses, triggering an economic panic |
October 19, 1857: | Proslavery delegates meeting at Lecompton to ratify a Kansas constitution legalizing slavery |
November 26, 1857: | Kansas territorial governor Robert J. Walker confronts President Buchanan at the White House on the Lecompton Constitution and is rebuffed |
December 3, 1857: | Douglas visits Buchanan at the White House, demands he reject the Lecompton Constitution as a violation of popular sovereignty, and is threatened by the president that he will be crushed |
December 8, 1857: | Buchanan endorses the Lecompton Constitution in his first annual message to the Congress |
December 9, 1857: | Douglas denounces Buchanan in a speech before the Senate |
December 11, 1857: | Frederick P. Stanton, acting territorial governor serving in Walkers absence, dismissed by Buchanan |
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