Something in that Declaration -- The Republican revolution: Pennsylvania picks Lincoln -- Mobilizing for war -- We will die in defense of our right to liberty: the Civil War on Pennsylvania's border -- Combating the threat without and within -- Pennsylvania and the second American Revolution -- A day long to be remembered.
Summary
This book takes you to and beyond the battlefield at Gettysburg, to cities and towns throughout the state where Pennsylvanians fought over the meaning of the Union even as they fought for it. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, white and black Pennsylvanians along the state's southern border-in towns like Sadsbury, Coatesville, and Christiana-had been fighting with slave owners and catchers for a decade. And, more than a year after Lee's Army of Northern Virginia left southcentral Pennsylvania, the town of Chambersburg survived another, even more devastating Confederate invasion. For much longer than four years, Pennsylvanians waged war at home and abroad, to save the Union and to rethink its founding principles. Keystone State in Crisis tells that story. [from the publisher]
"On April 17, 1865, eighteen year old John Rakestraw left the family farm in Bart Township, Lancaster County, to attend Unionville Academy, a small Quaker boarding school in Chester County. During the time he was away his two older sisters wrote to him regularly. Ten of those letters have survived and they provide a candid and often painfully honest glimpse of life on a Lancaster County farm in the 1860's. Diaries and ledgers kept by John's father, William I. Rakestraw , provide additional insight into that that time and place." [excerpt from the text]
"By following the story of my great-grandmother Isabella Ford's life, and adding to it with information from available sources, I have been able to get a better understanding of the circumstances of Lancaster's free blacks. Her story provides a sense of life in mid-nineteenth century Lancaster County and shows how free black families held their own, despite an environment that was often unfriendly and that restricted their opportunities by both law and custom."
Jonah Davenport, an early eighteenth century Lancaster Indian trader, his son William Davenport, a Carlisle saddler, and grandson, Samuel Davenport, Trader General of the Tribes of Texas
"On the American frontier, there were men who always pushed the edge. These were often the Indian traders, solitary men who purchased great lots of manufactured goods, loaded them on trains of pack horses or mules and set out into the wilderness to trade with the Indians in exchange for skins and furs. Such a man was the Indian trader Jonah Davenport."
