Abraham Lincoln was not the first Republican presidential candidate. It was Georgia native John Frémont who ran four years before Lincoln. Born in Savannah in 1813, Fremont graduated from the College of Charleston. South Carolina diplomat Joel Poinsett got Fremont appointed to the Army’s topographical engineers, and his life’s work was set. Fremont surveyed and […]
Political flip-flopping is nothing new. George Washington Bonaparte Towns began his political life as a staunch Unionist. Born in 1801 in Wilkes County, Towns’ career followed a familiar path in the antebellum South: lawyer, militia officer, and representative in the Georgia House and Senate, where he opposed the states rights politics of South Carolinian John […]
Americans may love individual liberties, but there is a social engineering streak in some of us a mile wide—and when reformers can’t persuade, they try to pass laws. Prohibition in the United States goes back to the 1820s and 30s, during the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestants organized both temperance […]
She was an outspoken opponent of slavery who married one of the largest slaveholders in the South. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born in London in 1809 in a family of actors, and she became an established actress herself. In Philadelphia in 1832 she met and eventually married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner with […]