Since the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, signaling the beginning of open war between the colonies and England, America has been credited with a singular conviction, a concern for military veterans' and others' economic and political rights. The idea of America as a promised land of economic opportunity, social mobility, and political freedom has not always flourished. Historians have both given it reality and shaken its substance as they exposed an undercurrent of greed, class conflict, and corruption. In this book Harold Hyman explores the question of American singularity, using the Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead and Morrill acts, and the G.I Bill to measure individual access to land, education, and law. The Northwest Ordinance, enacted in 1787 to encourage settlement of the nation's untamed territories, mandated the establishment of public schools and stable property rights in newly settled lands--specific terms which enshrined the basic liberties secured by the Revolutionary War. Hyman shows that through the Homestead and Morrill acts of 1862, legislators sought to preserve the values of the Union and to prepare for the entrance of the black man into citizenship. Equal access to public lands in the West and to state land-grant universities, countered the economic and social injustices blacks and poor whites would face after the Civil War. Finally, Hyman asserts that the G.I. Bill preserved beneficial social programs forged during the depression, carrying into post-World War II America a widespread concern for education and housing opportunities. Examining the legislation that emerged from three periods of conflict in American history, Hyman reveals a consistent pattern favoring equal access to land, education, and law--a progression of singular, if sometimes flawed, attempts to embody in our statutes the values and aspirations that sparked our major wars.

At the time of his death, renowned Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas was at work on a life of one of the most controversial figures in American history: Edwin McMasters Stanton, the man who marshaled the military forces of the Union in the Civil War and played a crucial role in the only presidential impeachment trial in our history. Harold Hyman, himself a prize-winning historian, undertook to carry on from the advanced point in research and writing that Thomas had reached. The result of their collaborative efforts is a monumental work worthy to stand beside Thomas’s own Lincoln as a truly outstanding American biography. Continuously absorbing and written with clarity and grace, Stanton gives an objective, full-scale portrait of this complex and enigmatic figure. Stanton could be explosive and domineering or gentle or considerate; he was at once single-minded and self-doubting. That Stanton should be “controversial” is curious, for he served with distinction under three Presidents; Lincoln offered him unquestioning trust and warm personal friendship. Yet Stanton’s name is commonly associated with duplicity rather than with selfless patriotism, including charges that he connived in Lincoln’s murder, betrayed each of the Presidents he served, antagonized such generals as McClellan and Sherman, and thwarted opportunities for the peaceful reconciliation of North and South. This biography puts legend and prejudice in clear perspective by going directly to documentary evidence, by probing into Stanton’s motives and methods, and by evaluating his accomplishments and failures. It is a judicious and honest portrait of a stubborn, dedicated man; but it also brings to light many important details about the times in which he lived.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

America was not as ready as she thought for the strains that civil war would place on here revered charter of government.