A closely argued critique that exposes the deadly implications of the Constitution’s careful euphemisms about slavery.
A historian finds the seeds of an inevitable civil war embedded in the “contradictions, ambiguities, and silences” about slavery in the Constitution.
Fully aware of the embarrassing disconnect between the American Revolution’s rhetoric and the facts on the ground, the colonists adopted a politics of slavery that sought to normalize or dissolve the institution into euphemisms like “species of property.” By the 1780s, with America newly independent, enlightened minds foresaw the end of slavery, but that movement collided with a simultaneous push for a stronger federal government. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention issues of state sovereignty and representation were inextricably bound “with the question of slaves as taxable wealth and as persons in, but seemingly not of, the polity.” Waldstreicher (History/Temple Univ.; Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution, 2004, etc.) efficiently demonstrates how the Framers, without mentioning slavery, crafted a document which, through several interlocking provisions, sought to preserve the institution while strengthening the proposed national government. Rejecting the lazy notion that the Framers either ignored or “left unfinished” the business of slavery, Waldstreicher reveals how they were actually obsessed with it, turning disagreements about it into a structure “to manage doubts and conflicts about nationhood as well as slavery itself.” In the subsequent ratification debate, which the author rightly terms “the beginnings of American national politics,” the Constitution’s simultaneous precision and vagueness permitted advocates to defend it as proslavery in some states, antislavery in others. Anti-federalists knew the Constitution would impair the people’s ability, locally or nationally, to affect slavery, and they saw in its ambiguities a perfect illustration of its threat to state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the people approved the Convention’s handiwork, confirming a pattern of dealmaking over slavery that held until the beginning of the Civil War.
A closely argued critique that exposes the deadly implications of the Constitution’s careful euphemisms about slavery.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9453-0
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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