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Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett

Online ISBN:
9781469628622
Print ISBN:
9781469628608
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett

Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
12 September 2016
Online ISBN:
9781469628622
Print ISBN:
9781469628608
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

Best known today as “the other speaker at Gettysburg” alongside Abraham Lincoln, Edward Everett had a distinguished and revealing career in American politics between the 1820s and the Civil War. He served as a member of both houses of Congress, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. representative to Britain, president of Harvard, and Secretary of State. On the strength of his crusade to save Mount Vernon as a shrine to the Union, Everett also appeared as a vice presidential candidate in the momentous presidential election of 1860. He was unrivalled as an orator and statesman for Union. This study of Everett’s political career illuminates vital themes at the state, national, and international levels of American politics, across several decades. Everett was deeply committed both to vision of moral and material reform and to preserving the Union by tying Americans’ hearts to a shared history. But the issue of slavery constantly threatened to derail all of Everett’s nation-building efforts. This political biography, by tracing Everett’s movement along the antislavery spectrum, exemplifies how most Northerners considered slavery within a larger context of competing priorities that alternately furthered or blocked antislavery action. Everett’s moderate position on slavery and perennial efforts to preserve the sacred Union connected him with masses of his fellow Americans. The emotional popular response to his appeals illustrates the ongoing power of Unionism even as the nation’s sectional divide worsened. This account of Everett’s career thus helps us see the coming of the Civil War as a three-sided, not a two-sided, contest.

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