BLOOD AND IRON Civil War, Emancipation, and a Nation Remade: AMERICAN CHRONICLES Volume IV of X 1851-1875 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798183554922)

Every compromise had bought time. By 1861, the time had run out.

For seven decades, the United States had managed the question of slavery's future through negotiation - the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, each one buying less time than the last. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act tore up that bargain entirely, and Americans started shooting each other over it years before the larger war began. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to settle the question by judicial fiat and instead destroyed what remained of the political middle ground. By 1861, eleven states had left the union rather than accept a president whose party they believed threatened their entire way of life - and they said so, in writing, without euphemism.

Blood and Iron tells the story of the war that followed: the costliest conflict in American history, killing more Americans than every other war combined until very recently. It follows Lincoln from a losing Senate campaign to the Gettysburg Address to an assassin's bullet five days after Lee's surrender. It follows the war's own transformation - from a fight to save the union into a fight to end slavery - through the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States Colored Troops, and the Thirteenth Amendment that finally abolished what compromise could never quite bring itself to touch.

And it follows what came after: Reconstruction's remarkable twelve years of genuine Black political participation in the defeated South - Black senators, Black state legislators, schools and churches built from nothing - and the calculated political bargain in 1877 that abandoned all of it, trading federal troops for a contested presidency and inaugurating nearly a century of legally enforced racial subordination.

This is the volume where compromise finally failed, and the bill finally came due.