Southern Biography Series – serie

Cutting across the Bourbon Era, the Populist Revolt, and the Progressive Movement, Hoke Smith's career gave expression to the Southern politics of his generation. In Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South, Dewey Grantham examines in detail the central role of this leader as a key to the better understanding of the political mind of the New South.A vital force in Georgia politics for almost forty years, Hoke Smith was a powerful politician, a brilliant lawyer, a successful newspaper publisher, and a leading educational reformer. He was a member of President Cleveland's second cabinet, was twice governor of Georgia, and served for ten years in the United States Senate. His career touched virtually all of the important developments in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.From the cross-currents of national and sectional events emerges Hoke Smith the individual. For the first time, in this full-length biography, Smith is seen in the perspective of the times in which he so emphatically participated. In its careful examination of his acts and motivations, the book captures at once the essence of a man and a political type, as well as of an important period.

The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery's long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens.A fervent disciple of South Carolina ""radical"" John C. Calhoun's nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region's most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organised a private military, or ""filibustering"", expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi's most vehement ""fire-eater,"" Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War.The first critical biography of this important figure, May's study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or ""antibourgeois"" and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.

From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1864 as Sherman's troops marched in triumph toward South Carolina, James Henry Hammond witnessed the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom of the Old South. Planter, politician, and partisan of slavery, Hammond built a career for himself that in its breadth and ambition provides a composite portrait of the civilisation in which he flourished.A long-awaited biography, Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South reveals the South Carolina planter who was at once characteristic of his age and unique among men of his time. Of humble origins, Hammond set out to conquer his society, to make himself a leader and a spokesman for the Old South. Through marriage he acquired a large plantation and many slaves, and then through shrewd management and progressive farming techniques he soon became one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served as governor of his state. A scandal over his personal life forced him to retreat for many years to his plantation, but eventually he returned to public view, winning a seat in the United States Senate that he resigned when South Carolina seceded from the Union.James Henry Hammond's ambition was unquenchable. It consumed his life, directed almost his every move, and ultimately, in its titanic calculation and rigidity, destroyed the man confined within it. Like Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, Faust suggests, Hammond had a ""design,"" a compulsion to direct every moment of his life toward self-aggrandizement and legitimation. Hammond envisioned himself as the benevolent, paternal, but absolute master of his family and his slaves. But in reality, neither his family, his slaves, nor even his own behavior was completely under his command. Hammond ardently wished to perfect and preserve the southern way of life. But these goals were also beyond his control. At the time of his death it had become clear to him that his world, the world of the Old South, had ended.

In a region famous for its flamboyant politicians, Earl K. Long was one of the most flamboyant of them all. This first full-scale biography of the former Louisiana governor explores his controversial life-style and his strong family ties, his raw humor and his political savvy, his abuse of power and his accomplishments in the areas of civil rights and public services. Michael L. Kurtz and Morgan D. Peoples provide new information from recently declassified FBI files concerning Earl's ties with organised crime figures, give the first comprehensive account of his stays in mental institutions in 1959, and offer factual information about his notorious relationship with the stripper Blaze Star. Based on more than two decades of research in a variety of sources, this important biography fills a serious gap in the history of modern Louisiana politics.

In her admirable biography of Mary Chesnut, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has American literature as well as American history in her debt."" - C. Vann WoodwardMary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. A Diary from Dixie (republished in 1981 as Mary Chesnut's Civil War)is far more than a simple diary, however, for Mrs. Chesnut's drawing room was a social center for many of the most prominent political and military figures in the Confederacy. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilises Mrs. Chesnut's autobiographical writings, her papers, and those of her family, as well as published sources. It traces her life in South Carolina from her childhood, as the daughter of a governor and United States senator, through her schooling and her marriage to James Chesnut, Jr., the son of a wealthy South Carolina planter. During the war her husband served as an aide to P. G. T. Beauregard and to Jefferson Davis, achieving the rank of general.Muhlenfeld emphasises Mary Chesnut's last twenty years, when she helped her family through the intricacies of repaying immense debts incurred during the Civil War, rebuilding wrecked homes, and reestablishing some measure of order and security. These were also the years of her serious writing. She experimented with fiction, writing three novels and translating others from the French; and in 1881 she began the last revisions of her Civil War journal. In the descriptive passages, characterizations, thematic patterns, and overall structure of the revised journal, Chesnut employed the techniques she had learned by writing fiction.Besides adding to our knowledge of this unusual nineteenth-century southern woman, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography enhances our knowledge of the history of women in general as it delineates the transformation of a wartime diary into the chronicle that remains a major document in southern history.

Considering the course his life took, one might wonder how Zachary Taylor ever came to be elected the twelfth president of the United States. According to K. Jack Bauer, Taylor ""was and remains an enigma."" He was a southerner who espoused many antisouthern causes, an aristocrat with a strong feeling for the common man, an energetic yet cautious and conservative soldier. Not an intellectual, Taylor showed little curiosity about the world around him. In this biography - the most comprehensive since Holman Hamilton's two-volume work published more than thirty years ago - Bauer offers a fresh appraisal of Taylor's life and suggests that Taylor may have been neither so simple nor so nonpolitical as many historians have believed.Much of Taylor's adult life was spent in the army, although his military career proved unexceptional until circumstances thrust him into command of the troops sent to occupy Texas. That role projected him into the first clashes with Mexico on the northen bank of the Rio Grande. With minimal advance planning, Taylor led his men against the northern Mexican center of Monterrey, where he displayed little confidence as a battlefield commander. Nevertheless, he forced the defender to request terms. The ensuing armistice brought him the disapprobation of the government but greater public renown. His fame was later assured by his troops' victory at Buena Vista, a battle that cleared the path to the White House.Taylor's sixteen months as president were marked by disputes over California state-hood and the Texas-New Mexico boundary. Taylor vehemently opposed slavery extension and threatened to hang those southern hotheads who favoured violence and secession as a means to protect their interests. He died just as he had begun a reorganisation of his administration and recasting of the Whig party.Balanced and judicious, forthright and unreverential, and based on thoroughgoing research, this is likely to be for many years the standard biography of Zachary Taylor.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was one of the prominent figure of American politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The son of a slaveholding South Carolina family, he served in the federal government in various capacities, as senator from his home state, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice-president in the administrations of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was a staunch supporter of the interests of his state and region. His battle from tariff reform, aimed at alleviating the economic problems of the southern states, eventually led him to formulate his famous nullification doctrine, which asserted the right of states to declare federal laws null and void within their own boundaries.In the first full-scale biography of Calhoun in almost half a century, John Niven skillfully presents a new interpretation of this preeminent spokesman of the Old South. Deftly blending Calhoun's public career with important elements of his private life, Niven shows Calhoun to have been at once a more consistent politician and a far more complex human being than previous historians have thought. Rather than history's image of an assured, self-confident Calhoun, Niven reveals a figure who was in many ways insecure and defensive.Niven maintains that the War of 1812, which Calhoun helped instigate and which nearly resulted in the nation's ruin, made a lasting impression on Calhoun's mind and personality. From that point until the end of his life, he sought security first from the western Indians and the British while he was secretary of war, then from northern exploitation of southern wealth through what he regarded as manipulation of public policy while he was vice-president and a senator. He worked tirelessly to further the South's slave-plantation system of economic and social values. He sought protection for a region that he freely admitted was low in population and poor in material resources, and he defended a position that he knew was morally inferior.Niven portrays Calhoun as a driven, tragic figure whose ambitions and personal desires to achieve leadership and compensate for a lack of inner assurance were often thwarted. The life he made for himself, the peace he felt on his plantation with his dependent retainers, and the agricultural pursuits that represented to him and his neighbors stability in a rapidly changing environment were beyond price. Calhoun sought to resist any menace to this way of life with all the force of his character and intellect. Yet in the end Calhoun's headstrong allegiance to his region helped to destroy the very culture he sought to preserve and disrupted the Union he had hoped to keep whole.Niven's masterful retelling of Calhoun's eventful life is a model biography.

John Brown Gordon's career of prominent public service spanned four of America's most turbulent decades. Born in Upson County, Georgia, in 1832, Gordon practiced law in Atlanta and, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, developed coal mines in northwest Georgia. In 1861, he responded to the Confederate call to arms by raising a company of volunteers. His subsequent rise from captain to corps commander was unmatched in the Army of Northern Virginia. He emerged from the Civil War as one of the South's most respected generals, and the reputation that Gordon earned while ""wearing the gray"" significantly influenced almost every aspect of his life during the next forty years.After the Civil War, Gordon drifted into politics. He was elected to the United States Senate in 2873 and quickly established himself as a spokesman for Georgia and for the South as a whole. He eloquently defended the integrity of southern whites while fighting to restore home rule. In addition to safeguarding and promoting southern interests, Gordon strove to replace sectional antagonisms with a commitment to building a stronger, more unified nation. His efforts throughout his post-war career contributed significantly to the process of national reconciliation.Even in the wake of charges of corruption that surrounded his resignation from the Senate in 1880, Gordon remained an extremely popular man in the South. He engaged in a variety of speculative business ventures, served as governor of Georgia, and returned for another term in the Senate before he retired permanently from public office. He devoted his final years to lecture tours, to serving as commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans, and to writing his memoirs, Reminiscences of the Civil War.Utilizing newspapers, scattered manuscript collections, and official records, Ralph Eckert presents a critical biography of Gordon that analyses all areas of his career. As one of the few Confederates to command a corps without the benefit of previous military training, Gordon provides a fascinating example of a Civil War citizen-soldier. Equally interesting, however, were Gordon's postwar activities and the often conflicting responsibilities that he felt as a southerner and an American. The contributions that Gordon made to Georgia, to the South, and to the United States during this period are arguably as important as any of his career.

First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P. G. T. Beauregard is universally regarded as ""the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing"" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to the principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war, Beauregard was almost the only prominent Confederate general who adapted successfully to the New South, running railroads and later supervising the notorious Louisiana Lottery. This paradox of a man who fought gallantly to defend the Old South and then helped industrialize it is the fascinating subject of Williams' superb biography.

Winner Of The Jefferson Davis Award Rising from humble origins in the middle Georgia cotton belt, Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883) became one of the South's leading politicians and lawyers. Thomas E. Schott has written the first scholarly biography that analyses the interplay between the public and private Stephens and between state and national politics during his contradictory career. Stephens was a celebrated Whig, turned Democrat, who served as congressman from 1843 to 1859 and an antisecessionist who became vice-president of the Confederacy. Ignored by the Davis administration once in office, he eventually opposed most of its wartime policies. Schott argues that Stephens' devotion to the southern cause was as genuine as his devotion to civil liberties and states' rights. After the war, he became an elder statesman for Georgia, serving nine more years as a congress-man and the last five months of his life as governor.

In this highly acclaimed and enduring biography, John R. Alden traces the interwoven histories of George Washington and the nation he helped to create, defend, and guide toward the future. Alden revisits the major events of Washington's personal and professional life, including his boyhood in rural Virginia, his early careers as a surveyor and then a soldier in the French and Indian War, and his staid but lasting marriage. The core of the biography concerns Washington's leadership roles, his assumption of the post of commander in chief of the Continental Army, his part in the Constitutional Convention, and his presidency. As Alden reveals, Washington's greatness lay in his total devotion to the cause of the American nation and in his wisdom as a leader.

Born in rural Virginia during Reconstruction, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was a central figure in black history and an important American scholar. In 1912, he became the first and only individual of slave parentage to earn a Ph.D. in history. In 1915 he founded the Association for the Study of Negro (now African-American) Life and History, and he devoted the remainder of his life to the study and advancement of the history of his race. His legacy of achievement extends to the present day. In preparing this detailed biography of Woodson, the first book-length treatment of his life, Jacqueline Goggin conducted extensive research in archival sources throughout the country. From a paucity of primary materials, she provides as complete an account as possible of Woodson's humble upbringing and early influences. She also describes his education at Berea College, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, and his early career as a teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C., an experience that deepened his belief in the uplifting power of education for blacks. Drawing upon Woodson's own writings, correspondence from a wide range of collections, and numerous secondary sources, the author delineates Woodson's work both within and outside the ASNLH, as well as his contributions to the interpretation of American history.Woodson maintained that knowledge of Negro history would inculcate blacks with a sense of self-esteem and alleviate white racism, and he initiated a series of educational programs and publications directed toward black and white intellectuals as well as the mass of African Americans. He edited the Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin and wrote many influential books, notably The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 and The Negro in Our History. Through his research and writing, he challenged prevailing stereotypes about blacks and established black history as a legitimate field of inquiry, enduring all the while the patronizing attitudes of many white historians, educators, and philanthropists, on whom he relied for always-scarce funding. Woodson also used his scholarship to influence the policies of black social welfare and protest organisations such as the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the more radical Friends of Negro Freedom. W. E. B. Du Bois said of Woodson that he ""kept to one goal, and worked at it stubbornly and with unwavering application and died knowing that he accomplished much if not all that he planned."" This important intellectual biography reveals the complex and dedicated individual Woodson was and the lasting significance of his pioneering work in black history.

Elite, personable, and persuasive, Edward Douglass White, a ''large and bearish man from Louisiana,'' served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, first as an associate justice (1894-1910) and then as the ninth chief justice (1910-1921), White significantly influenced American public law. Robert Highsaw' s extensive judicial biography stresses White's constitutional thought and philosophy. Several chapters discuss his early years in Louisiana, his training in Jesuit schools there and at Georgetown University, and his early legal career in New Orleans. The emphasis, however, remains on White's theories and applications of the judicial and constitutional processes. Edward Douglass White ""looked upon the American constitutional system as a model for a well-ordered society that must be preserved."" White's concept of a federal system in which the national and state governments each operated within a defined sphere of powers underlay many of his opinions. White considered farm issues that developed after the closing of the western frontier, economic issues precipitated by a growing laboring class, and tense political issues of civil liberties that emerged during World War I. He played an important part in developing administrative law and was, perhaps, most responsible for strengthening dual federalism of commerce and taxing powers. His pragmatism, evidenced in the Insular cases where his doctrine of ""incorporated"" and ""unincorporated"" territories, synthesized American constitutional law with the political reality of American imperialism. White was a conservative, but unlike the conservative justices of the 1920s and 1930s whose intransigence produced the judicial revolution of 1937, he saw that injury to the Constitution might result from its consistent use as a barrier to social progress. Significantly, Edward Douglass White demonstrates that ""the judicial revolution of 1937 and the ensuing decades of the Court's history are meaningless unless we know what happened fifty or so years earlier.

Joseph Brown was a pivotal figure in southern history and a prototype of a new breed of southern politician in the mid-nineteenth century-the hill country newcomer who was considered to represent the ""common man.""As governor of Georgia from 1857 to 1865, Brown enthusiastically supported the Confederacy in the early years of the war, though he refused to sacrifice what he considered states' rights to the interest of a Confederate victory. Brown was constantly at odds with Jefferson Davis concerning Georgia's supply of Confederate troops and was openly hostile, to the .point of urging Davis' removal over the matters of conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus. When defeat came for the South, Brown accepted the collapse of the old economic order as quickly as he did the loss of slavery and states' rights. He advocated a new South and amassed a fortune in the development of real estate, mining, and railroads. He turned Republican and promoted congressional Reconstruction measures, temporarily losing his influence in Georgia. But in 1871 he rejoined the Democratic party and served in the United States Senate from 1880 to 1891.Here is the first full-scale biography of a man of meager education and limited political experience who worked his way from the North Georgia mountains to the positions of governor and United States senator. Drawing on previously unavailable documents, Parks captures the mood of Georgia as well as the personality of this astute and controversial politician.

David Boyd's biography is the story of one man's dedicated struggle to protect and preserve Louisiana's fledgling state university from the cumulative effects of war, Reconstruction, political hostility, and parochial greed. Boyd fought hard to promote his vision of higher education among a largely antagonistic or apathetic citizenry. He died, bitter and disillusioned, in 1899, without realizing his dream. But his life was not wasted. Clearly those who governed the university in more prosperous days owned much of their success to the devotion and self-sacrifice of this heroic figure.

Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy's son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will's nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy.Known as the ""gray eagle of the delta"" for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family's property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy's death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father's law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father's long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan's grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state's rising demagogue politicians.In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the ""White Chief."" It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues' fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father's side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will's true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past, his memoir Lanterns on the Levee.""During my day,"" he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, "" I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity."" It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family's values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.

Daniel Russell is a good example of what Carl Degler has termed ""the other South."" The son of an aristocratic eastern North Carolina family of staunch Whig-Unionists, he entered politics when the Republican party first appeared in the state after the Civil War. For more than forty years thereafter he fought the solid South mentality of the Bourbon Democrats, first as a Radical Republican judge, then as a Greenbacker congressman, and finally as a Republican governor with Populist sympathies-the only chief executive of his party that North Carolina had between Reconstruction and the 1970s.The basic themes of Russell's political life were racial and economic in nature. As a judge on the state superior court he ruled in the Wilmington opera house case of 1873 that blacks could not be denied accommodations on the account of their race. As a congressman he embraced the cause of currency reform and the regulation of corporate enterprise. Elected governor in 1896 by an uneasy coalition of Populists and Republicans, an alliance that Crow and Durden fully examine, he pushed reforms designed to bring nonresident corporations under stricter state supervision and challenged the ninety-nine-year lease of the state-owned North Carolina Railroad to J.P. Morgan's Southern Railway Company. The Democrats' triumphant white-supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 and the resulting disfranchisement of black voters, however, crushed these progressive initiatives, and afterward the complex and sometimes irascible Russell kept a low profile until his tern ended in 1901. His final years were taken up by a famous interstate lawsuit that he initiated to force North Carolina to pay certain Reconstruction debts it had repudiated.The reasons for Russell's political failure while southern Progressives of the period generally succeeded shed much new light on the reform movement in the South between 1890 and 1910. Although the reforms that he took up were no more radical than those called for by his contemporaries, Crow and Durden find in this first full account of his career that ""in the last analysis, Russell's unique blend of Old South paternalism toward blacks with New South radicalism concerning currency and railway reform challenged too many taboos of race, class, and party.

This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman's life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819-1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren's son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow. Later in life, Lee debated with senators, fed foreign emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed soldiers. As a Confederate sympathiser in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces' dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished. Lee's personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life. She was an elite southern woman who knew the rules but who also flouted and other times flaunted the prevailing gender arrangements. Her views on status suggest that the immeasurable markers of prestige were much more important than wealth in her social stratum. She had strong ideas about who was (or was not) her ""equal,"" yet she married a man of quite modest means. Lee's biography also enlarges our view of Confederate patriotism, revealing a war within a war and divisions arising as much from politics and geography as from issues of slavery and class. Mary Greenhow Lee was a woman of her time and place , one whose youthful rebellion against her society's standards yielded to her desire to preserve that society's way of life. Genteel Rebel illustrates the value of biography as history as it narrates the eventful life of a surprisingly powerful southern lady.

Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan (1787-1867) was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with a remarkable array of social, economic, and political contacts in pre-Civil War America. In this, the first biography of Duncan, Martha Jane Brazy offers a compelling new portrait of antebellum life through exploration of Duncan's multifaceted personal networks in both the South and the North.Duncan grew up in an elite Pennsylvania family with strong business ties in Philadelphia. There was little indication, though, that he would become a cosmopolitan entrepreneur who would own over fifteen plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, collectively owning more than two thousand slaves. With style and substance, Martha Jane Brazy describes both the development of Duncan's businesses and the lives of the slaves on whose labor his empire was constructed. According to Brazy, Duncan was a hybrid, not fully a southerner or a northerner. He was also, Brazy shows, a paradox. Although he put down deep roots in Natchez, his sphere of influence was national in scope. Although his wealth was greatly dependent on the slaves he owned, he predicted a clash over the issue of slave ownership nearly three decades before the onset of the Civil War. Perhaps more than any other planter studied, Duncan contradicts historians' definition of the southern slaveholding aristocracy. By connecting and contrasting the networks of this elite planter and those he enslaved, Brazy provides new insights into the slaveocracy of antebellum America.

When attorney John Jay Cornelison severely beat Kentucky Superior Court judge Richard Reid in public on April 16, 1884, for allegedly injuring his< honor, the event became front-page news. Would Reid react as a Christian gentleman, a man of the law, and let the legal system take its course, or would he follow the manly dictates of the code of honor and challenge his assailant?James C. Klotter crafts a detective story, using historical, medical, legal, and psychological clues to piece together answers to the tragedy that followed.""This book is a gem. . . . Klotter's astute organisation and gripping narrative add to the book's appeal. . . . [He] has written a fascinating book that will be of interest to a wide audience."" - American Historical Review""A moving story well told, it does force the reader to reflect on our own era and consider whether we value leaders who respect the rule of law or those who believe that honor demands swift and bloody vengeance no matter the costs."" - Ohio Valley History""A rich and compelling work that offers fresh insights into the tense interplay among religion, law, and honor in the American South.""- Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Wife of the great naturalist John James Audubon, Lucy Bakewell Audubon (1788-1874) was a powerful and extraordinary woman who coped resourcefully with the demands of a difficult situation and worked tirelessly to aid her husband in his landmark work. In Lucy Audubon: A Biography, Carolyn E. DeLatte focuses on the early life of Lucy Audubon: her birth in England and youth in eastern Pennsylvania, her courtship and marriage to the eccentric young Audubon, their wanderings along the western fringe of the country, the birth of their children, and the preparation and publication of The Birds of America. Throughout, DeLatte emphasises Lucy Audubon's own experiences, concerns, and point of view. She tells of Lucy's often stormy relationship with her brilliant but unreliable husband, her place at the head of their small family, and her crucial role in the creation and publication of her husband's magnum opus. Intelligent, adaptable, and strong-willed, Lucy was, DeLatte shows, the partner Audubon needed for his life and for his work. As noted Audubon expert Christoph Irmscher says in his foreword, ""When [DeLatte] slips into her character's skin, she does so unobtrusively and to great effect, thus, we are right there with Lucy.

Well researched... and well written, this work gives us Kendall, warts and all. We see the avarice, the ambition, and the contradictions of his subject.... This is biography at its best."" - Journal of American HistoryA rare, fascinating personality emerges in Donald B. Cole's biography of Amos Kendall (1789-1869), the reputed intellectual engine behind Andrew Jackson's administration and an influential figure in the transformation of young America from an agrarian republic to a capitalist democracy. Born on a small Massachusetts farm and educated at Dartmouth, Kendall moved to Kentucky as a young man to seek his fortune and eventually became one of the few nationally prominent antebellum politicians who successfully combined northern origins and southern experience. Kendall's role in democratizing American politics is shown in a compelling narrative of his evolution from a republican idealist to a democratic individualist who contributed greatly to the rise of the Democratic Party. The first biography of Kendall, this superbly written and researched volume charts the progression of American democracy and the culture that created it. ""Donald B. Cole's splendid book is carefully researched, detailed yet boldly interpretive, and gracefully written."" - Civil War History ""[T]his biography is both enjoyable and an indispensable read for those interested in understanding the development of Jacksonian democracy."" - Journal of the Early Republic

Mississippi native Lucy Somerville Howorth (1895-1997) championed for the rights of women long before feminism was a widely recognised movement. Dorothy S. Shawhan and Martha H. Swain tell her remarkable life story, from her small-town upbringing to her career as an attorney, to her role as a New Deal activist in Washington D.C. Howorth became known for her leadership qualities and quick appraisal of social problems, particularly as they affected women. She became general counsel of the War Claims Commission and held a presidential appointment under four different presidents. This first-ever biography of Howorth bestows long-overdue recognition of her many achievements and illuminates the activism of women long before the women's movement.

One of the most eccentric and accomplished politicians in all of American history, John Randolph (1773-1833) led a life marked by controversy. The long-serving Virginia congressman and architect of southern conservatism grabbed headlines with his prescient comments, public brawls, and clashes with every president from John Adams to Andrew Jackson. The first biography of Randolph in nearly a century, John Randolph of Roanoke provides a full account of the powerful Virginia planter's hard-charging life and his impact on the formation of conservative politics.The Randolph lineage loomed large in early America, and Randolph of Roanoke emerged as one of the most visible - and certainly the most bombastic - among his clan. A colourful orator with aristocratic manners, he entertained the House of Representatives (and newspaper readers across the country) with three-hour-long speeches on subjects of political import, drawing from classical references for his analogies, and famously pausing to gain ""courage"" from a tumbler at his side. Adept at satire and uncensored in his verbal attacks against colleagues, he invited challenges to duel from those he offended; in 1826, he and the then-secretary of state Henry Clay exchanged gunfire on the banks of the Potomac.A small-government Jeffersonian in political tastes, Randolph first entered Congress in 1799. As chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee he memorably turned on President Jefferson, once and for all, in 1805, believing his fellow Virginian to have compromised his republican values. As a result, Randolph led the ""Old Republicans,"" a faction that sought to restrict the role of the federal government.In this rich biography, David Johnson draws upon an impressive array of primary sources - Randolph's letters, speeches, and writings - previously unavailable to scholars. John Randolph of Roanoke tells the story of a young nation and the unique philosophy of a southern lawmaker who defended America's agrarian tradition and reveled in his own controversy.

A central political figure in the first post-Revolutionary generation, Felix Grundy (1775-1840) epitomized the ""American democrat"" who so famously fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville. Born and reared on the isolated frontier, Grundy rose largely by his own ability to become the Old Southwest's greatest criminal lawyer and one of the first radical political reformers in the fledgling United States. In Democracy's Lawyer, the first comprehensive biography of Grundy since 1940, J. Roderick Heller reveals how Grundy's life typifies the archetypal, post-founding fathers generation that forged America's culture and institutions.After his birth in Virginia, Grundy moved west at age five to the region that would become Kentucky, where he lost three brothers in Indian wars. He earned a law degree, joined the legislature, and quickly became Henry Clay's main rival. At age thirty-one, after rising to become chief justice of Kentucky, Grundy moved to Tennessee, where voters soon elected him to Congress. In Washington, Grundy proved so voracious a proponent of the War of 1812 that a popular slogan of the day blamed the war on ""Madison, Grundy, and the Devil."" A pivotal U.S. senator during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Grundy also served as Martin Van Buren's attorney general and developed a close association with his law student and political protégé James K. Polk. Grundy championed the ideals of the American West, and as Heller demonstrates, his dominating belief - equality in access to power - motivated many of his political battles. Aristocratic federalism threatened the principles of the Revolution, Grundy asserted, and he opposed fetters on freedom of opportunity, whether from government or entrenched economic elites.Although widely known as a politician, Grundy achieved even greater fame as a criminal lawyer. Of the purported 185 murder defendants that he represented, only one was hanged. At a time when criminal trials served as popular entertainment, Grundy's mere appearance in a courtroom drew spectators from miles around, and his legal reputation soon spread nationwide. One nineteenth-century Nashvillian declared that Grundy ""could stand on a street corner and talk the cobblestones into life."" Shifting seamlessly within the worlds of law, entrepreneurship, and politics, Felix Grundy exemplified the questing, mobile society of early nineteenth-century America. With Democracy's Lawyer, Heller firmly establishes Grundy as a powerful player and personality in early American law and politics.

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex - and far more interesting - than his legend.Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive.During Boone's lifetime (1734-1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colourful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity. Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero - and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.

One of the least publicly recognised heroes of the civil rights movement in the United States, John Minor Wisdom served as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1957 until his death in 1999 and wrote many of the landmark decisions instrumental in desegregating the American South. In this revealing biography, law professor Joel William Friedman explores Judge Wisdom's substantial legal contributions and political work at a critical time in the history of the South.In 1957, President Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit, which included some of the most deeply segregated southern states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In the tumultuous two decades following its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court issued only a few civil rights decisions, preferring instead to affirm Fifth Circuit Court opinions or let them stand without hearing an appeal. Judge Wisdom, therefore, authored many of the decisions that transformed the South and broke down barriers of all kinds for African Americans, including the desegregation of public schools.In preparing this first full-length biography of Judge Wisdom, Friedman had unrestricted access to Wisdom's voluminous repository of personal and professional papers. In addition, he draws on personal interviews with law clerks who served under Judge Wisdom, resulting in a unique, behind-the-scenes account of some of the nation's most important legal decisions: the admission of the first black student to the University of Mississippi, the initiation of contempt proceedings against Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, and the destruction of obstacles that had previously kept black Americans from voting. Friedman also explores Wisdom's political life prior to joining the federal bench, including his pivotal role in resurrecting the Louisiana Republican Party and in securing the Republican presidential nomination for Eisenhower.A compelling account of how a child of privilege from one of America's most socially and racially stratified cities came to serve as the driving force behind the legal effort to end segregation, Champion of Civil Rights offers judicial biography at its best.

In this lavishly illustrated biography of silversmith and graphic artist William Spratling (1900-1967), Taylor D. Littleton reintroduces one of the most fascinating American expatriates of the early twentieth century. Best known for his revolutionary silver designs, Spratling influenced an entire generation of Mexican and American silversmiths and transformed the tiny village of Taxco into the ""Florence of Mexico."" Littleton widens the context of Spratling's popular reputation by examining the formative periods in his life and art that preceded his brilliant entrepreneurial experiment in the Las Delicias workshop in Taxco, which left a permanent mark on Mexico's artistic orientation and economic life.Spratling made a fortune manufacturing and designing silver, but his true life's work was to conserve, redeem, and interpret the ancient culture of his adopted country. He explained for North American audiences the paintings of Mexico's modern masters and earned distinction as a learned and early collector of pre-Columbian art. Spratling and his workshop gradually became a visible and culturally attractive link between a steady stream of notable American visitors and the country they wanted to see and experience.Spratling had the rare good fortune to witness his own reputation - as one of the most admired Americans in Mexico - assume legendary status before his death. William Spratling, His Life and Art vividly reconstructs this richly diverse life whose unique aesthetic legacy is but a part of its larger cultural achievement of profoundly influencing Americans' attitudes toward a civilisation different from their own.

The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his ""Yankee"" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.