Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress - Softcover

Miller, William Lee Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679768440 ISBN 13: 9780679768449

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

In the 1830s slavery was so deeply entrenched that it could not even be discussed in Congress, which had enacted a "gag rule" to ensure that anti-slavery petitions would be summarily rejected. This stirring book chronicles the parliamentary battle to bring "the peculiar institution" into the national debate, a battle that some historians have called "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." The campaign to make slavery officially and respectably debatable was waged by John Quincy Adams who spent nine years defying gags, accusations of treason, and assassination threats. In the end he made his case through a combination of cunning and sheer endurance. Telling this story with a brilliant command of detail, Arguing About Slavery endows history with majestic sweep, heroism, and moral weight.
"Dramatic, immediate, intensely readable, fascinating and often moving."--New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author:

William Lee Miller has taught at Yale University, Smith College, Indiana University, and the University of Virginia, where he is currently Miller Center of Public Affairs Scholar in Ethics and Institutions. He has been an editor and writer on a political magazine, a speechwriter, and a three-term alderman. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Arguing About Slavery, which won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679768440
• ISBN 13: 9780679768449
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592