The Stormy Present: Conservativism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 By Adam I. P. Smith

Abstract

Historians of Indiana and the Midwest during the Civil War era will find this book both unsurprising and unconvincing. Adam I.P. Smith, a lecturer at University College London, attempts to leverage his British perspective to explain the causes of the Civil War. American Northerners, he contends, were conservatives; the impulse to defend tradition amid the transformations of a rapidly modernizing society led them to fight against the Southern rebellion.