Leonard L. Richards – författare

Richards' study presents not only a vivid portrait of John Quincy Adams but also provides an insightful exploration of American politics in the 1830s and 40s. Examining one of the few presidents who sustained a political career after his term in the White House, Richards depicts how two years after losing the presidential election to Andrew Jackson, Adams ran for the House of Representatives and served there until his death seventeen years later.During his outstanding congressional career, Adams became a folk hero in much of the North--hailed by some as "Old Man Eloquent" and "the conscience of New England" by others--while much of the South feared him, regarding him as a traitor and the "archest enemy of slavery that ever existed." Richards explores in detail Adams' battles with such prominent figures as Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster on the issues of slavery, the Indians and their land, the annexation of Texas, and the potential war against Mexico. Highlighting his importance in the anti-slavery movement, Richards reassesses Adams' role as a political analyst and as a vital force in the turbulent politics of the day.

In the popular imagination, slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation may have been limited-freeing only slaves within Confederate states who were able to make their way to Union lines - but it is nonetheless generally seen as the key moment, with Lincoln's leadership setting into motion a train of inevitable events that culminated in the passage of an outright ban: the Thirteenth Amendment. The real story, however, is much more complicated - and dramatic - than that. With Who Freed the Slaves?, distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards tells the little-known story of the battle over the Thirteenth Amendment, and of James Ashley, the unsung Ohio congressman who proposed the amendment and steered it to passage. Taking readers to the floor of Congress and to the back rooms where deals were made, Richards brings to life the messy process of legislation - a process made all the more complicated by the bloody war and the deep-rooted fear of black emancipation. We watch as Ashley proposes, fine - tunes, and pushes the amendment even as Lincoln drags his feet, coming aboard and providing crucial support only at the last minute.Even as emancipation became the law of the land, Richards shows, its opponents were already regrouping, beginning what would become a decades-long - and largely successful-fight to limit the amendment's impact. Who Freed the Slaves? is a masterwork of American history, presenting a surprising, nuanced portrayal of a crucial moment for the nation, one whose effects are still being felt today.

From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the American national government and used their power to ensure the extension of slavery. Later termed the Slave Power theory, this idea was no mere figment of a lunatic fringe's imagination. It was, as Leonard L. Richards shows in this innovative reexamination of the Slave Power, endorsed at midcentury by such eminent and circumspect men as Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, the editors and owners of the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, and the president of Harvard College. With The Slave Power, Richards reopens a discussion effectively closed by historians since the 1920s- when the Slave Power theory was dismissed first as a distortion of reality and later as a manifestation of the ""paranoid style"" in the early Republic- and attempts to understand why such reputable leaders accepted this thesis wholeheartedly as truth and why hundreds of thousands of voters responded to their call to arms.Through incisive biographical cameos and narrative vignettes, Richards explains the evolution of the Slave Power argument over time, tracing the oft-repeated scenario of northern outcry against the perceived slaveocracy, followed by still another ""victory"" for the South: the three-fifths rule in congressional representation; admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820; the Indian removal of 1830; annexation of Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1847; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and more. Richards probes inter- and intraparty strategies of the Democrats, Free-Soilers, Whigs, and Republicans and revisits national debates over sectional conflicts to elucidate just how the southern Democratic slaveholders- with the help of some northerners- assumed, protected, and eventually lost a dominance that extended from the White House to the Speaker's chair to the Supreme Court.The Slave Power reveals in a direct and compelling way the importance of slavery in the structure of national politics from the earliest moments of the federal Union through the emergence of the Republican Party. Extraordinary in its research and interpretation, it will challenge and edify all readers of American history.