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Broken Glass Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union Civil
War in the North
Series, #2
courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books |
One of the most colorful, controversial, and misunderstood public figures of the 19th century
“The most hated man in New England,”as critics dubbed him on
the eve of the Civil War, Caleb Cushing, brash and controversial,
was perhaps the last of 19th-century America’s renaissance €gures.
Poet and politician, essayist and diplomat, general and lawyer, this
multidimensional scion of a Newburyport, Massachusetts, mercantile
family moved in and out of positions of power and influence for
more than fifty years.
First as a spokesman for the Whig and then the Democratic
Parties, Cushing served in Congress, as the minister to China, as a
general in the Mexican War, as U.S. attorney general, and as a legal
adviser and diplomatic operative for Presidents Lincoln, Johnson,
and Grant. With an unharnessed mind and probing intellect, Cushing
inspired and infuriated contemporaries with his strident views
on such topics as race relations and gender roles, national expansion
and the legitimacy of secession. While his positions generated
arguments and garnered enemies, his views often mirrored those of
many Americans. His abilities and talents sustained him in public
service and made him one of the most outstanding and fascinating
figures of the era.
Biographer John Belohlavek delivers a work of importance
and
originality to specialists in the areas of mid-nineteenth-century
political, legal, and diplomatic history as well as to those interested
in New England history, antebellum gender relations, civil-military
relations, and Mexican War studies.
This is the second book in the Civil War in the North Series which highlights innovative scholarship that broadens our understanding of what the American Civil War meant to Northern society. This new series encompasses overlooked and under-researched topics, from the battlefield to the homefront, from the antebellum era through Reconstruction.
John M. Belohlavek is a professor of history at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His previous publications include Divided We Fall: Essays on the Problems of Confederate Nationalism of Confederate Nationalism (1991) and Let the Eagle Soar: The Foreign Policy of Andrew Jackson Jackson (1985).
Of related interest:
Banners South: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union by Edmund J. Raus
