About the Project.

Few Americans were more involved with the coming of the Civil War than the newspaper editors whose words have been collected here. Circulation-hungry and fiercely devoted to the political parties that sustained them, these writers were passionate and nearly inflexible in their views. The editorials they wrote remind us that the people of the era experienced events not with the comprehensive hindsight and revealed secrets of the historian but rather through the disconnected and opinionated fragments supplied by these journalists.

Three events (Nebraska, Dred Scott, and Harper's Ferry) were chosen for this project for their universal prominence in historical writing. A fourth incident, the attack on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, was included not only because of its importance to S. C. history but also because historians are becoming increasingly aware how the Sumner incident shocked politics away from Know-Nothingism, the so-called "immigrant question," and liquor prohibition to slavery and sectionalism.

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Contributors and Acknowledgments