George Bagby has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors. The most-rated is Slavery and the Civil War: What Your History Teacher Didn't Tell You.
Sacred Conviction
Summary
Historians have long understood that conflicts over slavery, Constitutional interpretation, economic interests, and culture contributed to the coming of the War Between the States. Joseph Jay’s original and insightful study illuminates yet another important difference that fueled conflict between the North and South — theology. It has been more than once observed that Southern clergy were among the strongest advocates of Southern Independence. Jay shows why that was so. He explains how Southerners based their faith on Biblical authority and regarded the “Higher Law,” Unitarianism, and crusading political religion of their Northern counterparts as a threat to Christianity.
©2018 Shotwell Publishing LLC (P)2020 Shotwell Publishing LLC
Causes of the Civil War
Summary
The dominant narrative about the causes of the Civil War is the work of historians obsessed with social activism instead of history. They point to the 13th, 14th, and 15th postbellum amendments as proof that the North was ultimately fighting to provide slaves with honorable freedom, but deny that the increase in tariffs on dutiable items from 19 percent before the war to an average of 45 percent for 50 years thereafter reflected a Northern war aim. They hold Southern secession responsible for the war, but fail to teach that the Northeastern states threatened to secede five times between 1789 and 1850. They also decline to note that Southern secession need not have led to war. Southerners had no purpose to overthrow the Washington government; they merely wanted a government of their own. Northerners could have evacuated Fort Sumter and let the first seven cotton-states depart in peace, thereby avoiding the war. Modern historians normally focus on the reasons the cotton-states seceded, instead of examining the economic reasons Northerners chose to militarily coerce them back into the Union, thereby inaugurating civil war. The Republican party could have stopped the spread of slavery peacefully by endorsing popular sovereignty during the presidential election of 1860. After Kansas used it to reject slavery in an local-option vote in 1858, nearly every politico realized that the doctrine would quarantine slavery in the South. If popular sovereignty could not make a slave state out of Kansas, it could not do it to any of the remaining federal territories of 1860. Republicans rejected the doctrine simply to survive as an independent party because Lincoln’s main two opposing presidential candidates supported it. Beyond what poplar sovereignty would have gained, the Republican blanket-ban on slaves in the territories added nothing except to inflame the sectional passions that led to civil war.
©2020 Philip Leigh (P)2021 Shotwell Publishing LLC
Slavery and the Civil War: What Your History Teacher Didn't Tell You
Summary
Nothing in American history has ever equaled the death and destruction of the intense and bloody warfare of 1861-1865 between Americans. Given the size of the population at the time, that period is unmatched in the scale of military mobilization, in the destruction of property on our own soil, and in the casualties, not only of soldiers but of Southern civilians, Black and White. For later generations, such a horror must have the comfort of a moral justification. We fall back on righteousness and romanticism: The war must have been a noble and necessary crusade carried out against evil people who refused to give up their slaves. But is this true? Did those men in blue really sacrifice their lives for the freedom and equality of Black Americans? Did those men in gray give their lives so that some could continue to hold Black Americans in slavery? Garry Bowers, with 20 years teaching experience in Alabama public schools tackles this great question with information, reason, and courage. Shotwell is proud to publish this work for the use of students and teachers.
©2019 Garry Bowers (P)2020 Shotwell Publishing LLC