July 17th, 2024 – Our 217th meeting. We continue our twentieth year!!!
The next meeting of the Clarksville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Wednesday, July 17th, 2024 at Fort Defiance Park, our new home, 120 Duncan Street, off New Providence Blvd. Turn onto Walker Street off New Providence Blvd. and then onto Duncan Street. There are site markers on New Providence Blvd above and below the park.
The meeting begins at 7:00 pm and is always open to the public. Members, please bring a friend or two – new recruits are always welcomed.
Our Speaker and Topic – ” Electing Civil War: The Long Campaign of 1860 & The Crisis of Constitutional Democracy”
The Election of 1860 has been considered as the most important in American history. The outcome of the election of Abraham Lincoln brought about the start of secession with South Carolina in December 1860. Four candidates had vied for the job; Lincoln, of the new Republican Party, running only their second candidate ever; Tennessean John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party; Kentucky’s John Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic Party and Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisian Stephen Douglas of the Democratic Party.
The issues were stark and long building for decades. The nation had split in many ways and the election set powerful events into motion where only about 80 years since the founding of the nation it split apart into a vicious Civil War.
Our speaker this month has been with us before. Dr. Aaron Astor’s lecture discusses the pivotal Presidential election of 1860, in which the Republican nominee, Abraham Lincoln, defeated three rival candidates. Though South Carolina’s secession from the Union immediately followed Lincoln’s victory, Astor will demonstrate just how the long, tumultuous election campaign mobilized much of the country for both secession and civil war.
Aaron Astor, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. He is the author of the books, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, 1860-1872 (2012) and The Civil War Along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau (2015), and co-editor of the book, Slavery: Interpreting American History (2021). He has also written eleven articles for the award-winning New York Times Disunion series, addressing such topics as guerrilla warfare, battles and campaigns in the Western Theater, popular politics, emancipation and race, and regional identity in the Appalachian South. He is currently working on a book project that explores the 1860 Presidential election as a grassroots phenomenon from the perspective of four distinct American communities. Astor earned his Ph.D. in History at Northwestern University in 2006 and his B.A. at Hamilton College in 1995.
Dr. Astor will have copies of his previous books for sale at the meeting.