1850-1877: Government and Politics: Publications

Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866)—a tour of inspection by a representative of Atlantic Monthly;

Timothy Shay Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1855)—sensational support for the temperance movement;

William G. Brownlow, Sketch of Parson Brownlow, and His Speeches (New York: E. D. Baker, 1862)—outlook of a Unionist from east Tennessee;

Orestes Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (New York: O’Shea, 1866)—an analysis of American nationalism by an intellectual converted to Catholicism;

John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1851)—a posthumous publication of the theoretical underpinnings to Calhoun’s states’ rights views;

Anna Ella Carroll, The Great American Battle (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856)—anti-Catholic arguments on behalf of the Know Nothing Party;

E. N. Elliott, Cotton Is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments (Augusta, Ga: Pritchard, Abbot & Loomis, 1860)—an anthology of influential essays defending slavery as not merely an unfortunate reality but as a desirable institution;

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857)—defends slavery as an institution without regard to considerations of race, suggesting a rationale for enslavement of the white lower class;

Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854)—argues for superiority of a slave-based social structure over relations predicated on wage labor;

Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857)—an important attack on slavery as an impediment to Southern development and an oppression of nonslaveholding whites;

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868)—the view of life inside the White House by the African American dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln;

Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (London: Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863)—the famous British actress recounts her visit to an estate owned by her new husband; the journal was published for the first time during the war to influence public opinion;

Thomas Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits (New York: G. W. & J. A. Wood, 1860)—an argument that American tariff and commercial policies had diverted the revenues created by the slaveholding economy;

Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government, 2 volumes (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853)—a theoretical exposition by a German nationalist and political scientist who taught for years at South Carolina College;

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)—among many other things, an allegory of the Compromise of 1850 and ominous view of the fate of “thirty isolatoes federated on one keel”;

Charles Nordhoff, The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 (New York: D. Appleton, 1876)—a New York journalist supports restoration of local powers in the South;

Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861)—condensation of three books based on Olmsted’s travels through the South in the 1850s, dedicated to English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill;

James S. Pike, The Prostrate State (New York: D. Appleton, 1874)—racist denunciation of Reconstruction in South Carolina by a New York journalist;

Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour (Cincinnati & New York: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1866)—a report by the influential writer for the New York Tribune;

Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (Philadelphia: National Publishing; Chicago: Zeigler, McCurdy, 1868–1870)—the vice president of the Confederacy attempts to recount the Civil War as conflict over state sovereignty;

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: J. P. Jewett; Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1852)—appeared previously in serial installments in The National Era, an antislavery newspaper.