No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the nineteenth century. Raised in...

During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious women...

Later called the Tariff of Abominations, the Tariff of 1828 increased the tax on imported manufactured goods. The law economically benefitted the North—New England in particular favored high tariffs—and injured the South, which believed that the tariff was unconstitutional.