A HOUSE DIVIDING Democracy, Expansion, and the Slavery Crisis Deepens: AMERICAN CHRONICLES Volume III of X - 1826-1850 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798183551785)

Every compromise buys time. The question is always how much - and at what price.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson rode the largest popular mandate any president had yet received into the White House, expanding American democracy to a scale the founding generation would barely have recognized. The same president then used the full power of federal law to drive tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people from their homelands at gunpoint - defying a Supreme Court ruling that said he had no right to do it.

A House Dividing tells the story of the twenty-five years in which this contradiction became impossible to ignore. Jackson broke the Bank of the United States and faced down a state's attempt to nullify federal law. Texas won its independence at the Alamo and San Jacinto, then spent a decade as a slaveholding republic too unstable to survive without American annexation. A war against Mexico delivered California and the Southwest to the United States - and immediately reopened the one question every previous compromise had only postponed.

It is also the story of the people who refused to let that question stay postponed. William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. Frederick Douglass's escape and his devastating testimony. Harriet Tubman's repeated returns to slave territory at the risk of her own recaptured freedom. The organized abolitionist movement that, for the first time, made slavery's defenders answer for the institution rather than simply assume it.

By 1850, gold had been discovered in California, the nation stretched from coast to coast, and Congress had negotiated one final, increasingly desperate compromise. It would last four years - not the forty the Missouri Compromise had purchased thirty years earlier. The arithmetic of postponement was running out.

This is the story of the house before it finally divided.

Volume III of X - American Chronicles

Robert F. Geissler - Think Tank Media LLC

www.ThinkTankMedia.online