Description: The first major history of popular sovereignty. Uses popular sovereignty as a lens for viewing the radicalization of southern states' rights politics, demonstrating how this misbegotten offspring of slavery and Manifest Destiny, though intended to assuage passions, instead worsened sectional differences, radicalized southerners, and paved the way for secession.
Review Quotes:
"By analyzing the evolution of southerners' attitudes toward popular sovereignty from the 1770s to the Civil War, Childers has found much that is fresh and important to say about this venerable topic. A most welcome contribution indeed."--Michael Holt, author of The Fate of Their Country
"A thoughtful volume that brings fresh and keen insight to the role played by the doctrine of popular sovereignty in the unraveling of the American Union."--Lacy Ford, author of Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South
"A well-written, well-organized, and close study of the multiple and conflicted meanings of popular sovereignty."--Michael A. Morrison, author of Slavery and the American West