From award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards, an
authoritative and revealing portrait of an overlooked harbinger of
the terrible battle yet to come.
When gold was discovered at Sutter''s Mill in 1848, Americans of all
stripes saw the potential for both wealth and power. Among the more
calculating were Southern slave owners. By making California a
slave state, they could increase the value of their slaves—by 50
percent at least, and maybe much more. They could also gain
additional influence in Congress and expand Southern economic
clout, abetted by a new transcontinental railroad that would run
through the South. Yet, despite their machinations, California
entered the union as a free state. Disillusioned Southerners would
agitate for even more slave territory, leading to the
Kansas-Nebraska Act and, ultimately, to the Civil War itself.
關於作者:
Leonard L. Richards, Professor of History at
the University of Massachusetts, grew up in California, and earned
his AB, MA, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and
Davis. He has also taught at San Francisco State College and the
University of Hawaii. His "Gentlemen of Property and Standing":
Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America won the American
Historical Association''s Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1970. The
Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams was a Finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and The Slave Power: The Free
North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 took the second-place
Lincoln Prize in 2001. He is also the author, with William
Graebner, of The American Record 1981, 1987, 1995, 2000,
2005 and of Shay''s Rebellion: The American Revolution''s Final
Battle 2002. He and his wife live in Amherst,
Massachusetts.