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Introduction
- The University of Tennessee Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Part 2 of this collection includes a wide variety of documents, from political party platforms to newspaper articles to political speeches. By the early twenty-first century, political party platforms meant little to nothing. But in the nineteenth century, political party platforms constituted one of the major policy statements by political organizations. Newspapers reprinted party platforms, and those who could vote and those who could not vote debated the meaning and significance of each plank. Because party platforms were so important at the time, the major and some of the minor political party platforms are included here as another “voice” of that era. Examples of the ordinances of secession passed by the special state secession conventions are included in this section as representative of southern “fire-eater” political voices during the secession winter of 1860–1861. Controversial both at the time and since, it is not clear to historians that the secession ordinances reflected the will of the majority of people within the southern states. Rather, the secession ordinances reflect the success that the southern fire-eater extremists had in seizing and using state power and state policy before March 4, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln took the presidential oath of office. As such, these ordinances are better placed in this section and not in the “Public Policy Voices” section because they represent minority political voices—successful for a time, but disastrous in the long run for the very states that enacted them. Speeches by (at the time) a rising but nationally obscure Illinois attorney and regional politician, Abraham Lincoln, can be found here, as can speeches by Frederick Douglass, who, over time, became the unofficial leader of the black community, and by Jefferson Davis, the senator from Mississippi and the so-called Confederacy’s only president. Other political voices can be heard in this section, including those of Robert Edward Lee, Karl Marx, Union generals Benjamin Butler and John C. Frémont, and Pennsylvania’s Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens. These diverse individuals provide a sampling of the cacophony of the politicians and political party voices in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. ...