Maps ix
Introduction 1
Prelude: An Inheritance of Slavery 13
1. The Nation’s Conflict over Slavery in Miniature:
Illinois, 1818–1824 17
2. Democrats, Whigs, and Party Conflict, 1825–1842 34
3. Manifest Destiny, Slavery, and the Rupture
of the Democratic Party, 1843–1847 54
4. Advocates for an Antislavery Nation, 1837–1848 72
5. Stephen A. Douglas and the Northern Democratic Origins
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1849–1854 97
6. The Collapse of the Douglas Democracy, 1854–1860 123
7. Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of
an Antislavery Nationalism, 1854–1860 156
Conclusion: The Northern Democrats’ Dilemma
over Slavery 184
Acknowledgments 195
Appendix 199
Notes 205
Index 253
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"Making an Antislavery Nation is an elegant and important reinterpretation of the political battles between slavery and freedom from the nation's founding to the secession crisis. In focusing on Illinois, Graham Peck brilliantly highlights the significance of the state in national politics and of Stephen Douglas as the pivotal figure in the rise of antislavery politics and disunion. His portrait of Douglas is unequaled in a story that is structurally and stylistically a work of immense sophistication."--John Stauffer, Harvard University, and author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
"Graham Peck offers a sophisticated analysis of the forces that led to the Civil War, emphasizing how Abraham Lincoln disguised the wolf of radical antislavery nationalism with conservative sheep's clothing, and how Stephen A. Douglas was gradually crushed between the upper millstone of Southern intransigence and the nether millstone of Northern disaffection for his toleration of slavery."--Michael Burlingame, author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life
"The victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party was the most significant political revolution in American history. Graham A. Peck's penetrating account of the politics of slavery in Illinois - at once a key battleground state and a microcosm of the nation as a whole - offers a powerful new interpretation of this critical moment in antebellum politics. By fusing antislavery radicalism with American nationalism, Lincoln and the Republicans overcame an increasingly proslavery northern Democratic Party. Thoroughly researched and judiciously argued, Making an Antislavery Nation changes the way we understand the triumph of the Republicans and the origins of the Civil War."--Matthew Karp, Princeton University, and author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy