Conservative Americanism

by Jesse George-Nichol

2024 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Conservative Americanism: Nativism, Unionism, and Slavery in Border South Politics, 1854-1861 explores the rise of Conservative Americanism-an ideology that linked the worsening sectional crisis of the 1850s to the country's growing immigrant population-among former Whigs in the Border South. Jesse George-Nichol challenges the prevailing wisdom that Unionism, rather than genuine nativism, drove these Southerners to join the nativist Know Nothing or American Party. She argues that Southern nativism and Unionism were inextricably linked, bound by a conviction that foreigners and foreign ideas posed a threat to slavery. Southern moderates understood that immigrants were responsible for the growing political imbalance between the free and slave states, and after the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, they came to believe that foreign radicalism was central to the mounting animus against slavery in the North and West. These Southerners increasingly saw the sectional conflict as one that not only pitted Northerners against Southerners and freedom against slavery, but also as a collision between native American moderation and foreign fanaticism. This perception continued to motivate Southern Know Nothings through the election of 1860, the secession crisis, and beyond. This book sheds new light on the relationships between conservatism, nativism, Unionism, and slavery in Border South politics before the Civil War. George-Nichol thus argues that understanding Southern nativism is essential to understanding Southern Unionism in the Civil War-era.

Confederate Engineer

by George G. Kundahl

2000 · Univ. of Tennessee Press

"John Morris Wampler was a topographical engineer in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States and eventually became chief engineer of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Based on extensive use of Wampler's unpublished correspondence and journals, the biography follows his experiences before hostilities and then during the war in both major theaters. It also draws on the writings of his wife, Kate, to show how she struggled to hold their family together during the fighting. The combination of both the husband and wife's perspectives on the war makes this treatment unique."--Jacket.