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United States History

Theses/Dissertations

2013

Antebellum politics

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Fugitive Slave Law, Antislavery And The Emergence Of The Republican Party In Indiana, Christopher David Walker Oct 2013

The Fugitive Slave Law, Antislavery And The Emergence Of The Republican Party In Indiana, Christopher David Walker

Open Access Dissertations

The most contentious portion of the Compromise of 1850 between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. For decades slaveholders had complained of the difficulties encountered in reclaiming their fugitive slaves and demanded stronger legislation to deal with the problem. Northerners, however, did not believe that national legislation on the subject of fugitive slaves as embodied in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 provided adequate protection to free blacks and many states passed anti-kidnapping laws which often placed obstacles to rendition. Slaveholders discovered that the costs involved in reclaiming an absconding …


To The Indian Removal Act, 1814-1830, Kyle Massey Stephens Aug 2013

To The Indian Removal Act, 1814-1830, Kyle Massey Stephens

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a history of Indian removal as a political issue from the War of 1812 to the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Its central argument is that federal removal policy emerged and evolved due to a precise and largely unforeseen sequence of events. Drawing on Indian treaties, journals of negotiations, minutes of cabinet meetings, Congressional debates, personal memoirs, and a variety of other sources, the dissertation charts and elucidates the evolution of United States Indian policy from a diplomatic to a domestic concern. One of the central themes of the dissertation is how most white …