"In the years leading up to the Civil War, champions of both the North and South evoked the imagery of subversive conspiracies to rally support for their causes. Abolitionists preached that the nation had fallen under the shadow of a Slave Power conspiracy that sought to annihilate civil rights. Southern slaveholders claimed that abolitionists were using the fight against slavery as a first step toward the total subversion on law, order, and morality. A tightly focused study, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style examines these accusations within the framework of the "paranoid style" in politics, in which emotional unity is built through the creation of a common sense of peril and alarm. Analyzing the use of paranoid rhetoric by both sides of the debate, David Brion Davis closely traces the various permutations of the conspiracy theories and touches on their wider implications for American history."--Publisher's description.

The turbulent history of the United States has provided a fertile ground for conspiracies, both real and imagined. From the American Revolution to the present day, conspiracy discourse--linguistic and symbolic practices and artifacts revolving around themes, claims, or accusations of conspiracy--has been a staple of political rhetoric. Some conspiracy theories never catch on with the public, while others achieve widespread popularity. Whether successful or not, the means by which particular conspiracy theories spread is a rhetorical process, a process in which persuasive language, symbolism, and arguments act upon individual minds within concrete historical and political settings. Conspiracy rhetoric was a driving force in the evolution of antebellum political culture, contributing to the rise and fall of the great parties in the nineteenth century. One conspiracy theory in particular--the "slave power" conspiracy--was instrumental in facilitating the growth of the young Republican Party's membership and ideology. The Political Style of Conspiracy analyzes the concept and reality of the "slave power" in the rhetorical discourse of the mid-nineteenth-century, in particular the speeches and writing of politicians Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. By examining their mainstream texts, Pfau reveals that, in addition to the "paranoid style" of conspiracy rhetoric that inhabits the margins of political life, Lincoln, Chase, and Sumner also engaged in a distinctive form of conspiracy rhetoric that is often found at the center of mainstream American society and politics.

From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the American national government and used their power to ensure the extension of slavery. Later termed the Slave Power theory, this idea was no mere figment of a lunatic fringe’s imagination. It was, as Leonard L. Richards shows in this innovative reexamination of the Slave Power, endorsed at midcentury by such eminent and circumspect men as Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, the editors and owners of the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, and the president of Harvard College. With The Slave Power, Richards reopens a discussion effectively closed by historians since the 1920s—when the Slave Power theory was dismissed first as a distortion of reality and later as a manifestation of the “paranoid style” in the early Republic—and attempts to understand why such reputable leaders accepted this thesis wholeheartedly as truth and why hundreds of thousands of voters responded to their call to arms. Through incisive biographical cameos and narrative vignettes, Richards explains the evolution of the Slave Power argument over time, tracing the oft-repeated scenario of northern outcry against the perceived slaveocracy, followed by still another “victory” for the South: the three-fifths rule in congressional representation; admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820; the Indian removal of 1830; annexation of Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1847; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and more. Richards probes inter- and intraparty strategies of the Democrats, Free-Soilers, Whigs, and Republicans and revisits national debates over sectional conflicts to elucidate just how the southern Democratic slaveholders—with the help of some northerners—assumed, protected, and eventually lost a dominance that extended from the White House to the Speaker’s chair to the Supreme Court. The Slave Power reveals in a direct and compelling way the importance of slavery in the structure of national politics from the earliest moments of the federal Union through the emergence of the Republican Party. Extraordinary in its research and interpretation, it will challenge and edify all readers of American history.

A comprehensive history and analysis of the origins, evolution, and current life, legacy, and impact of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to today. Conspiracies have been woven through America’s social tapestry since the beginning of its history. The United States of Paranoia is a unique and fascinating look at how these commonly held beliefs—true or not—have helped shape the American cultural imagination. Using examples from colonial times to today, Jesse Walker makes the compelling argument that paranoia doesn’t just exist on the fringe of society, but is at the core of our national identity. Walker doesn’t focus on proving or disproving a particular theory. Synthesizing intensive archival research in a pulp fiction narrative, he explores the myths that haunt our nation, breaking them into five distinct categories: The Enemy Outside, The Enemy Within, The Enemy Above, The Enemy Below, and The Benevolent Conspiracy. From J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to Watergate, the “Matrix” phenomenon to the Birthers, Walker reveals how national myths have influenced our lives, including our view of ourselves and our government. He also identifies and explores the little-recognized rise of a subculture obsessed not with one single myth or another, but in the notion of the conspiracy phenomenon itself. This growing obsession, Walker attests, offers profound insight into what it means to be American. Provocative, well-reasoned, and utterly compelling, the United States of Paranoia will make you rethink the world and the nation in a new and different way.

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

A thought-provoking history of slaveholders' fear of the people they enslaved and its consequences From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. Because enslavers in British North America and the Caribbean methodically terrorized slaves and anticipated just vengeance, colonial officials consolidated their regime around the dread of rebellion. As Sharples shows through a comprehensive data set, colonial officials launched investigations into dubious rumors of planned revolts twice as often as actual slave uprisings occurred. In most of these cases, magistrates believed they had discovered plans for insurrection, coordinated by a network of enslaved men, just in time to avert the uprising. Their crackdowns, known as conspiracy scares, could last for weeks and involve hundreds of suspects. They sometimes brought the execution or banishment of dozens of slaves at a time, and loss and heartbreak many times over. Mining archival records, Sharples shows how colonists from New York to Barbados tortured slaves to solicit confessions of baroque plots that were strikingly consistent across places and periods. Informants claimed that conspirators took direction from foreign agents; timed alleged rebellions for a holiday such as Easter; planned to set fires that would make it easier to ambush white people in the confusion; and coordinated the uprising with European or Native American invasion forces. Yet, as Sharples demonstrates, these scripted accounts rarely resembled what enslaved rebels actually did when they took up arms. Ultimately, he argues, conspiracy scares locked colonists and slaves into a cycle of terror that bound American society together through shared racial fear.