"Offers biographical sketches of ten prominent Americans who confronted the central issues of the Civil War era-slavery, racism, and equality-evaluating their careers and shedding light on leadership, core American values, and problems plaguing US democracy. Those profiled include John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Albion Tourgée"-- "Modeling his latest book on Richard Hofstadter's 1948 classic The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, the renowned historian Paul Escott has composed ten concise but deeply learned and incisive biographies of key Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War. Escott profiles Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, Albion Tourgée, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, illustrating how these men and women established, embodied, and advanced the opposing political and cultural trends that culminated in the great crisis of the nineteenth century. Covering figures from across a wide political spectrum, Escott reveals numerous streams and facets of nineteenth-century American political thought to illuminate the forces, from slavery to suffrage, underlying this greatest of conflicts. Written accessibly and with a magisterial command of the subject, The Civil War Political Tradition is both a perfect introduction to this history and a penetrating new meditation on its players." -- Publisher's description Provided by publisher.

Introduction --Henry Clay : Old Virtues in New Times -- John C. Calhoun : inveterate ideologue -- Harriet Beecher Stowe : the power of her pen -- Frederick Douglass : the outsider as resolute prophet -- Stephen A. Douglass : overtaken by polarization -- Jefferson Davis : a defiant tradition and tradition defied -- Abraham Lincoln : riding the storm to historic progress -- Horace Greeley : American enthusiast -- Albion Tourgée : Civil War as a sustained clash of cultures -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton : profound radical.