Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina
Planters of S.C. went from a prosperous life to a world of economic distress, guilt over slavery, and apprehension of slave rebellion. Details of how this led the political leaders to states rights doctrines

American Civil War Documents

Civil War History Reading Book Titles

The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Supreme Court's decision against Dred Scott	A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865 An excellent overview of the antebellum slavery debate and its key issues and participants. The most important abolitionist and proslavery documents written in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War	A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy An account of Southern dissidents in the Civil War, at times labeled as traitors, Tories, deserters, or mossbacks during the war and loyalists, Lincoln loyalists, and Unionists by historians of the war
The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America Go behind the scenes of the crucial Missouri Compromise, the most important sectional crisis before the Civil War, the high-level deal-making, diplomacy, and deception that defused the crisis.	Reconstruction after the Civil War Chicago History of US Civilization Praised for cutting through the controversial scholarship and popular myths of the time to provide an accurate account of the role of former slaves during this period in American history	Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy Insights into the relatively neglected debates over fencing laws and hunting and fishing rights in the postemancipation South, and into the solidarity of the low-country black community
Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 An analysis of all aspects and particularly of the commercialism of black slaveowning debunks the myth that black slaveholding was a benevolent institution based on kinship, and explains the transition of black masters from slavery to paid labor.	The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 Zarefsky analyzes the rhetoric of the speeches, showing how Lincoln and Douglas chose their arguments and initiated a debate that shook the nation. Their eloquent, statesmanlike discussion of the morality of slavery illustrates the masterful use of rhetorical strategies and tactics in the public forum: a form of discourse that has nearly disappeared from the political scene today	Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln The definative book on the Lincoln Assassination, and the escape of John Wilkes Booth. not only does the author give a clear and concise accounting, he takes us out of the vacuum and explains the minute details of the very knotted relationships between the conspirators, and the links of the Confederate underground to Canada and back.