Browsing by Author "McDaniel, W. Caleb"
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Item Abraham Lincoln's Northwestern Approach to the Secession Crisis(2013-09-16) Bischoff, Sarah; Boles, John B.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Wilson, Rick K.; Walther, Eric H.While the migration of Abraham Lincoln’s family to the Northwest has often been documented as a significant event of his youth, historians have neglected the powerful repercussions this family decision had on Lincoln’s assessment of the South and the secession crisis in 1860 and 1861. Lincoln’s years living and working in the Northwest from 1831 to 1861 exposed him to the anti–slave system ethos of that region’s southern-born migrants. Sensitive to the restraints they believed the social system of slavery placed upon their own liberties, these former southerners simultaneously despised the slave system, hated African Americans, and sympathized with white slaveholders and nonslaveholders who remained in the South. After building his initial sense of southern society from these migrants, Lincoln spent his years as a U.S. congressman learning the significance of the Northwest Ordinance in creating the free society in which they had thrived. Emphasizing Thomas Jefferson’s role in conceiving the Northwest Ordinance and utilizing statistical evidence to prove the superiority of free soil over slave, Lincoln’s colleagues further expanded Lincoln’s conception of the South. All these influences combined to produce Lincoln’s uniquely northwestern approach to slavery, the South, and the secession crisis. Believing that the self-interest of white nonslaveholding southerners naturally propelled them away from the South and toward free society, Lincoln perceived the slave South as a vastly unequal society controlled by a minority of aristocratic slaveholders who cajoled or chided their nonslaveholding neighbors into accepting a vision of the South’s proslavery, expansionist future. As president-elect, Lincoln therefore overestimated the Unionist sentiment of southerners before and during the secession crisis. He remained convinced that the majority of white nonslaveholders would not support a secessionist movement that he believed countered their own self-interest. With time, and through careful communications with the South, he remained convinced that he could settle secessionist passions and bring southerners to trust him and the Republican Party. This northwestern perception of the South therefore explains, in part, Lincoln’s silence and his refusal to compromise during the secession crisis.Item Beyond Failure: Rethinking Confederate State Policies on the Western Frontier(8/1/2015) McDaniel, W. CalebThis paper was delivered at the Remaking North American Sovereignty conference held in Banff, Canada, July 30-August 1, 2015.Item Free Labor, Free Trade, and Free Immigration: The Vision of Pacific Community after the Civil War(2021-12-03) Ha, Arang; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Shimizu, Sayuri G.My dissertation explores the rise and fall of the vision of “Pacific community” in the decades following the Civil War. It approaches this narrative through the ideas and activities of the “antislavery internationalists” who envisioned connecting the American West and East Asia into a single economic zone. They believed that the transpacific networks of free immigration and free trade would ensure not only their country’s prosperity, but also the vitality of its free labor system in the post-emancipation era. By tracing various figures in the antislavery internationalist circle—Republicans, abolitionists, diplomats and missionaries to China, and intellectuals and journalists advocating free trade—my dissertation argues that free labor ideology, once a weapon used to attack slavery in the American South, was critical in constructing and then destructing the Pacific community. The first section of my dissertation examines the making of the vision of Pacific community, with a special focus on its dual origin in the Whig-Republican tradition of internal improvement and the cosmopolitan worldview of Anglo-American abolitionism. The second section highlights the grassroots challenges to the Pacific community. Analyzing rhetoric of “coolie slave labor” and Chinese “sex slave women,” this section shows that the abolitionist zeal provided rhetorical ammunition to anti-immigration nativists. The last section explores the collapse of the Pacific community, investigating how U.S. restrictions on Chinese immigration closed the Chinese door to American commercial activities in the country. The scholarship of this topic has exhibited periodic, thematic, and disciplinary divisions—between the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age; the “Chinese question” and the “China question”; and immigration history’s focus on inward-looking nativism and diplomatic history’s emphasis on America’s imperialistic expansion toward the Pacific. Challenging this fragmentation in historiography, my dissertation rediscovers the complex relationships among a set of historical ironies in post-Civil War America: the power of antislavery ideology in the post-slavery era, the collapse of free trade idealism amid Open Door rhetoric, and the rise of Chinese exclusion during the transformation of the United States into a Pacific nation.Item Embargo From Borderland to Southern Land: The Changing Landscape of the Sabine River Valley, 1800–1877(2024-08-06) Kisner, Bryson; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Hall, Randal L.Between 1800 and 1877, human-environment relationships underpinned the geopolitical and economic changes to the Sabine River Valley. Respectively, these changes were the bordering of multi-polity borderlands and the transition from a pericapitalist (capital-connected) economy to a more capitalist one. Anglo-American settlers and their nation-states, hoping to make the watershed part of the plantation-based landscape of the U.S. South, altered the river valley to effect these changes. The basin, however, was not entirely transformed. Significant portions of the river valley were resistant to plantation landscapes’ imposition. Instead, these environments preserved both the cultural diversity and the older, non-capitalist human-environment relationships of the former borderland. Eventually, capital found ways to extract wealth from such places. But these portions of the basin remained ecologically, economically, and culturally distinct from plantation-based landscapes. This history of the Sabine River Valley therefore demonstrates how the nineteenth-century expansion of the U.S. South, as a political project that included a fundamentally environmental aspect, both succeeded and failed subsuming new landscapes—and how those landscapes contributed to the creation of a more complicated, more diverse South by preserving spaces for marginalized communities and their cultures to survive. "From Borderland to Southern Land" thereby explores the changes in the landscape of the Sabine River Valley during the first three-fourths of the nineteenth century. It takes an environmental approach to this bioregion’s history and uses that methodology as the basis for a history of a North American borderland. In combining these fields, it explores the histories of various ethnic communities, including regionally distinct Hispanic and Indigenous peoples; of U.S. imperialism and expansion; of capitalism as an environmental as well as an economic and social phenomenon; and of the nature of the U.S. South as a region comprised of manifold landscapes. In doing so, it argues for narratives positioned at the intersection of environmental and borderlands histories.Item Gospel of Liberty: Antislavery and American Salvation(2014-04-14) Wright, Benjamin; Boles, John B.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Goetz, Rebecca A.Americans understood and sought to solve the problem of slavery in terms strongly colored by understandings of religious conversion. In the early-eighteenth century, Great Awakening revivals fueled a new belief in the transformative nature of religious conversion. By the antebellum era, theological changes – coupled with democratization and sectionalism – prompted greater direct confrontation with social reform. Historians have chronicled the role of religion in motivating antislavery thought, but by privileging political action over religious sentiment, earlier work misses non-political manifestations of early antislavery. If we take religious belief seriously and seek to understand antislavery motivations, the question is not whether reformers were gradualist or immediatist in political action, but whether or not they ascribed to the expectations of conversionist or purificationist causation. While conversionists sought to destroy slavery through the millennial expansion of salvation, other Christians looked within, laboring to purify their own communities through coercive action. Imperatives of conversion drove ministers to consolidate religious authority in new national denominational bodies. Forming these bodies had the unintended side effect of pushing denominationalists toward social reform. This process added organized social reform as an additional religious solution, alongside that of conversionist millennialism, to the era’s social problems. In the early 1830s, the conversionist consensus cracked, and a new coercive, sectionalist antislavery took its place. Conversionist appeals continued, but the antislavery of men and, increasingly, women challenged the causation of conversion and began to look to political agitation as a means of reform. Each stage of this progression shaped the worlds of American antislavery. By foregrounding conceptions of religious conversion, we can begin to understand the problem of human bondage and its potential solutions as did the men and women whose lives entangled daily with the reality of a slaveholding republic.Item Haiti's Usable Past: Violence, Anglophilia, and Antebellum American Abolitionists(2003) McDaniel, W. CalebItem Informed Activism: Antislavery Knowledge Production and the Global Discourse of Slavery, 1833-1843(2018-08-09) Skidmore, William E; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Sidbury, JamesBetween June 12 and June 23, 1840, more than 500 abolitionists met at Exeter Hall and debated the state of slavery throughout the world. More than 1,000 spectators attended the morning and evening panels daily as this international delegation discussed their ideas, views, and plans for how to bring the different forms and systems of slavery to an end. While this international convention included abolitionists from Spain, France, Switzerland, the British West Indies, Haiti, Canada, South Africa, British Guiana, most of the attendees (roughly 400) came from Great Britain and the United States. By uniting minds and hearts, this antislavery conference produced one of the nineteenth century’s most comprehensive bodies of scholarship on slavery and abolition The Convention of 1840 represented an impressive and unique achievement for this time. As later generations of antislavery and human rights activists attended similar international conferences and meetings, their scholarly activism benefited from Special Rapporteurs, transnational non-profit and interstate organizations that arranged these gatherings, and academic scholarship on slavery recognized by elite institutions. The international delegation of abolitionists at the Convention 1840, however, started their knowledge production and exchanges without these advantages. This is a dissertation about how knowledge production and information politics in the antislavery movement got started, as well as the additional obstacles that arose in this transnational crusade. In five chapters, this dissertation explores how Anglo-American abolitionists investigated systems of slavery outside of their national antislavery movements and how this knowledge shaped their activism and relationships with other reform groups. I achieve three primary objectives. First, I show how antislavery knowledge shaped the development of the transatlantic antislavery movement. Second, I show that antislavery organizations and abolitionists did not consider all forms of slavery the same. By following the scholarship that abolitionists produced about different systems of slavery, this study reveals that antislavery societies and abolitionists had an informal hierarchy that characterized specific slave systems as worse and more in need of eradication than others, which in part, gives coherence to the uneven and seemingly erratic development of the transatlantic antislavery movement. Finally, this dissertation argues that information and knowledge production lay at the heart of abolitionism. The creation and circulation of knowledge informed Anglo-American antislavery societies of where they needed to direct their attention, resources, and activism.Item Making the Bible Belt: Preachers, Prohibition, and the Politicization of Southern Religion, 1877-1918(2012-09-05) Locke, Joe; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Emerson, Michael O.; McDaniel, W. CalebH.L. Mencken coined “the Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and regional life in the American South. But the reality Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This dissertation is the history of its making. Over the course of several decades, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding religious authority transformed southern evangelicals’ inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Late-nineteenth-century religious leaders overcame crippling spiritual anxieties and tamed a freewheeling religious world by capturing denominations, expanding memberships, constructing hierarchies, and purging rivals. Clerics then confronted a popular anticlericalism through the politics of prohibition. To sustain their public efforts, they cultivated a broad movement organized around the assumption that religion should influence public life. Religious leaders fostered a new religious brand of history, discovered new public dimensions for their faith, and redefined religion’s proper role in the world. Clerics churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a popular political movement and, with prohibition as their weapon, defeated a powerful anticlerical tradition and injected themselves into the political life of the early-twentieth-century South. By exploring the controversies surrounding religious support for prohibition in Texas, this dissertation recasts the politicization of southern religion, reveals the limits of nineteenth-century southern religious authority, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.Item New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era: An Introduction(The University of North Carolina Press, 2012-06) McDaniel, W. Caleb; Johnson, Bethany L.Item "Our Country is the World": American Abolitionists, Louis Kossuth, and Philanthropic Revolutions(2004) McDaniel, W. CalebItem Our Country is the World: Radical American Abolitionists Abroad(Johns Hopkins University, 2006) McDaniel, W. CalebAntebellum abolitionists participated—through correspondence, print, and travel—in extensive transatlantic reform networks and often considered themselves citizens of the world. William Lloyd Garrison, the radical antislavery editor, was at the center of such networks and printed the same cosmopolitan slogan on every issue of his Boston newspaper, the Liberator: “Our Country is the World—Our Countrymen are All Mankind.” By focusing on the public and private writings of the Garrisonians—the antislavery radicals who took their name from Garrison—this dissertation shows how transnational reform networks functioned as communities of discourse in which the abolitionists developed radical ideas about slavery, democratic politics, nations, and patriotism. The Garrisonians’ transatlantic friendships, many of which were forged at a “World’s Convention” on slavery held in London in 1840, brought abolitionists into contact with numerous European radicals, including Chartists, free traders, Irish Repealers, and revolutionaries like the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini and the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth. Interpreting their networks in light of a broadly Romantic worldview, the Garrisonians were convinced that they were uniquely cosmopolitan figures. But the Garrisonians’ affinity with certain British reformers also reveals that they were more similar to other antebellum reformers than previously thought. Though often seen as the anti-political pariahs of the antislavery movement, the Garrisonians’ endorsements of movements like Chartism and Irish Repeal suggest that they were more sensitive to political strategy than scholars have allowed, and that they belong within a transatlantic context of democratic politics. The Garrisonians’ transatlantic networks were also crucial to their development of forward-looking ideas about nations and patriotism. Garrisonians were “civic nationalists” who viewed nations as political, rather than racial or ethnic, communities, and they also articulated a version of “cosmopolitan patriotism,” which identified love for country with a willingness to criticize the vestiges of despotism in American institutions. But in contrast to exceptionalist narratives, which view the concept of “civic nationalism” as an inevitable outgrowth of the nation’s founding creeds, I argue that the Garrisonians’ ideas about nations were forged within transnational discursive communities, and were informed in part by encounters with European reformers.Item Remembering Henry: Refugeed Slaves in Civil War Texas(2014) McDaniel, W. CalebThese are the prepared remarks for a talk at the 2014 OAH Annual Meeting in Atlanta, originally entitled "Refugeed Slaves and the Confederate Rehearsal for Reconstruction." The paper was part of a panel on New Perspectives on African American Mobility in the American South, chaired by Richard Blackett with comments from Yael Sternhell.Item Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Nationalists, and the Coming of the Civil War(2006) McDaniel, W. CalebItem Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism(Journal of the Early Republic, 2008) McDaniel, W. CalebItem Sovereign Spaces: Negotiating Native and Federal Power in the Old Southwest(2016-04-25) Brand, Lauren; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Yarbrough, Fay A.abstractItem Spreading the News about Hydropathy: How Did Americans Learn to Stop Worrying and Trust the Water Cure?(7/25/2012) McDaniel, W. CalebItem Strangers In A Strange Land: Voluntary Exile in the Civil War South(2019-04-18) Regelski, Christina; McDaniel, W. CalebStrangers In A Strange Land: Voluntary Exile in the Civil War SouthItem The Case of John L. Brown: Slavery, Sex, South Carolina, and the Whispering Gallery of Transatlantic Abolitionism(3/9/2011) McDaniel, W. CalebPlease see http://mcdaniel.blogs.rice.edu/?p=105 for an abstract.Item The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform(American Quarterly, 2005) McDaniel, W. CalebItem The Garrison War: Culture, Race, and the Problem of Military Occupation during the American Civil War Era(2013-04-18) Lang, Andrew; Boles, John B.; Gruber, Ira D.; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Stoll, Richard J.; Gallagher, Gary W; Parrish, MichaelFocusing on nineteenth-century American military occupation, this dissertation critically engages the existing literature on Civil War soldiers. It departs from the traditional historiographical paradigm of “why they fought and endured”—based on motivation and the experience of active combat—and instead emphasizes how the soldiering experience was fragmented and fraught with disillusionment and confusion. The Civil War traditionally is interpreted as period-divide between the antebellum and post-bellum eras. Soldiers’ responses to the culture of military occupation, however, revealed striking continuity across time, space, and conflict in nineteenth-century America. By uniting three principal events—the Mexican-American War, Civil War, and post-bellum Reconstruction—the study interprets how nineteenth-century volunteer citizen-soldiers struggled to understand their roles as occupying forces. As occupation emerged as a fundamental staple of the American military tradition, its complexities challenged the cultural ideals that fueled the citizen-soldier model. The milieu of occupation thus contested American soldiers’ integrity, masculinity, and racial identity. The citizen-soldier tradition collided with an equally aggressive, and oftentimes incompatible, force: the garrison ethos. Volunteer soldiers confronted the principal tenets of military occupation—securing, holding, and guarding territory; enforcing government policies; regulating and defining the limits of civilian-combatants; policing cities and towns; and battling guerrillas—viewing them as trials against the citizen-soldier ideal, which they had intended to fulfill.