The "Wicked Rebellion"
and the Republic: Henry Tuckerman's Civil War
ISBN 0-87462-327-8; 39 pp.
In 1861, the writer Henry
Tuckerman published one of the first analyses of the causes of
the Civil War, The Rebellion: Its Latent Causes and True Significance
. A popular journalist, historian, and poet, Tuckerman is
little known now but was a friend to such luminaries as Washington
Irving and William Cullen Bryant. Setting Tuckerman's pamphlet
into its literary and historical contexts--and drawing on the
underused but rich pamphlet literature written on war-related
topics during the crisis--Johannsen shows how this northern Democrat's
response to the outbreak of Civil War in the summer of 1861 reflected
many conservative Americans' reactions. Blaming the war on both
the slave power and the abolitionists, Tuckerman nevertheless
argued that the war would purify the Union and lead to a "Romantic
salvation for the American spirit."
Robert W. Johannsen has taught at the University of Illinois since
1959, where, at the time he delivered the Klement Lecture, he
was J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor. The author or editor
of eleven books and scores of essays, he has written Frontier
Politics and the Sectional Conflict (1955), Stephen
A. Douglas (1973), To The Halls of the Montezumas: The
Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985), and Lincoln,
The South, and Slavery (1991). Among his many awards are
a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Francis Parkman Prize for Literary
Distinction in the Writing of History.
