Word: davises
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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As early as 1857, the authors contend, Democratic and Republican leaders had become intransigent, so that the future Presidents' moderation "would become operative only when the other side retreated from its present position. Yet neither Lincoln nor Davis could regard a retreat from his particular position as aught but surrender...
Although Two Roads struggles to be dispassionate, its sympathies obviously lie with the Northern cause. Lincoln let pressures push him "to the brink of demagoguery" with his violent House Divided speech, but the gravest failure of moderation was in the South. Davis and other Southern leaders betrayed their temperate beliefs...
Pro-slavery Democrats distrusted their own people quite as much as they distrusted the North and the Republicans. Their weakness, not necessity, substituted opportunism for honest appeals for patience and unity. "Speaking for local effect" thus tainted both the moderation and the integrity of the Davis faction:
Their gravest blunder, and in retrospect the least excusable, was the notion that they could participate--even lead--in whipping up the most extreme and uncompromising attitudes among their constituents and local party delegations, then restrain these attitudes in time to avert misfortune.... By going so dramatically and forcefully on...
In Charlestown, the Cattons detect "a faint but undeniable whiff of decay" under the city's genteel tradition." Brierfield, Davis's estate, is said to have been in the Scarlett O'Hara tradition, and governors' messages are said to have "popped and rattled across the Gulf states like a chain...