描述
开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780307277572
authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of
the terrible battle yet 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.
“Richards, a leading historian of 19th century America superbly
illuminates gold rush California as a land in contention between
national pro– and anti–slavery lobbies in the decade leading up to
the Civil War.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Richards offers a broad panorama that moves seamlessly from the
gold fields to the halls of congress. This is an excellent work of
popular history that will add to the appreciation of a critical
epoch in our national development.”
—Booklist
“Brings to life a population of scheming officeholders, xenophobic
Californians and frantic slaveholders, all of whom resorted to the
ultimate frontier solution: violence.’
—Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing chronicle of the political intrigues that engulfed
California in the 1850s, when pro-Southern legislators there angled
to turn the state’s newfound wealth to the benefit of the slave
economy.”
—The Atlantic
“The important back-story of the Gold Rush, according to gifted
historian Leonard Richards, is political and racial. Mr. Richards
contends in this insightful new book, The California Gold Rush
and the Coming of the Civil War that for every fortune seeker
who viewed California as a place to get rich discovering gold,
another believed it a place to get rich exporting, utilizing, or
trafficking in human slaves. . . . [A] gripping book.”
—The New York Sun
“Richards meticulously catalogs details of 19th-century American
legislation that nonspecilaists won’t have thought about since high
school: the Missouri Compromise, the Gadsden Purchase, the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. But when he places the actors center stage to
reveal the motives behind the politics, the narrative approaches
the Shakespearean.”
—Tennessean
“With a mastery that brings even his bit players to life, Leonard
Richards tells a gripping story about politics, business, violence,
and the scoundrels who almost destroyed the United States. If you
think you already know this story, you’re in for some nice
surprises. And if you don’t, there’s no better guide.”
—Robin L. Einhorn, author of American Taxation, American
Slavery
“Leonard Richards has once again produced a wonderful,
entertaining, and informative account of antebellum politics. Most
important, he shows the myriad forces–greed, ambition, idealism,
racism, patronage, migration, expansionism–that melded together to
distance southerners from northerners. Any one reading this work
will come away with a deep understanding of how the antagonism
between free and slave labor systems constituted the volatile fuel
that made the explosion of secession and civil war possible.”
—James L. Huston, author of Calculating the Value of the Union:
Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil
War
“A truly rollicking book, full of colorful characters,
duels, hard-rock miners, ‘Chivs,’ and back-stabbing politics. But
its readability belies the centrality of these seemingly minor
characters to the drama of the nation’s sectional crisis. The
Golden State can no longer be ignored by those wishing to tell the
story of how the nation came to civil war.”
—Jonathan H. Earle, author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the
Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854
From the Hardcover edition.
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