Author: cleveland

Did the Institution of Slavery Cause the Civil War?

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2007, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: A debate on the cause or causes of the Civil War was held on January 10, 2007 as part of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable’s monthly meeting. It was an intercollegiate-style debate, i.e., two on the affirmative and two on the negative. The resolution debated was: Resolved: That the Institution of Slavery Was the Cause of the Civil War. The negative won, based on a vote of the attendees. Following the debate in that forum, John C. Fazio, the Roundtable president at the time of that debate, weighed in with the following.

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The Constitution Caused the Civil War

By Dan Zeiser
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2007, All Rights Reserved

Of course, you say, the Constitution caused the Civil War. By recognizing and institutionalizing slavery, the war was inevitable. But this is not the only reason that the Constitution caused the Civil War. There was another, perhaps more important, reason that the founding fathers caused our particular sectional strife. This reason is the electoral college.

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The War that Never Was: Britain, the U.S. and the Trent Affair

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2000, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the fall of 2000.

They say when it rains, it pours. And just when the United States was locked in a deadly struggle with the Confederacy, just when the military picture was at its bleakest, just when Abraham Lincoln’s desk was piled highest, it looked very likely that Great Britain – the mightiest empire on the face of the Earth – would, for the third time in ninety years, wage war against us. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. A conflict spanning the Atlantic was averted, and the U.S.-British war of 1861 became the war that never was.

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George Washington: Hero of the Confederacy?

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2007 Weider History Group
This article originally appeared in the October 2004 issue of American History magazine.

The cost of political greatness, it’s been said, is to be forced to campaign long after your death. That’s certainly true of George Washington, whose name, image, and legacy were appropriated by the Confederacy.

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Five Hundred Dead and a Hoax that Lives On

By Peter Holman
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

One hundred and forty years ago, a man hailed as a modern Robinson Crusoe made a brief appearance in newspapers across the world and continues today to impact genealogists, historical societies and miscellaneous bloggers throughout the world-wide web. And he was, with all moral certainty, long dead.

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Where is Lincoln Memorial University? What Was One of Lincoln’s Biggest Tactical Errors of the Civil War? What’s the Connection Between The Two?

By Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Lincoln Memorial University must be in Illinois or Washington, D.C. or Kentucky, right? No, no, and no, Lincoln Memorial University is in one of the strongest of Confederate states, Tennessee.

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Lincoln and the Black Hawk War

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2004, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from a chapter of Dale Thomas’s book, Lincoln’s Old Friends of Menard County, Illinois. After his failure to win the Whig nomination for Congress in 1843, Lincoln wrote to a political associate: “It is truly gratifying to me to learn that while the people of Sangamon [County] have cast me off, my old friends of Menard [County] who have known me longest and best of any, still retain their confidence in me.”1

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Lincoln and Cleveland

By Dale Thomas
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2003, All Rights Reserved

Artemus Ward

In 1857, Charles Farrar Brown became the local editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and began to write articles about an itinerant showman named Artemus Ward. Later moving on to Vanity Fair in New York City, Brown’s humorous commentary of the news was admired and enjoyed by Lincoln. “With the fearful strain that is on me night and day,” he told his Cabinet, “if I did not laugh I should die…”

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