A dramatic narrative that depicts how secession struck at the heart of republican government itself in the five months leading up to the Civil War. Klein (History/Univ. of Rhode Island; The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, 1986, etc.) notes that the 1860 presidential election featured three candidates (Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell) splintering the Democratic Party along sectional lines, with the successful Republican, Abraham Lincoln, taking only 40 percent of the popular vote, and all of his electoral votes were from the North. The party system, Klein writes, mirrored a country riven by differences arising from a growing immigrant population and, more important, from state and local customs regarding ``every shared national concept—democracy, religion, [and] freedom.'' Slave states, threatened by John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and Republican opposition to extending slavery into new territories, seceded one after another. Klein's focus on how individuals on both sides stumbled their way through this crisis throws these issues of nationalism into sharp relief. In Washington, lame-duck Democratic president James Buchanan, exhausted by sectional controversies, impotently declared that the South had no right to secession and the North no power to impede it. In Charleston Harbor, Major Robert Anderson, after waiting in vain for explicit orders from Buchanan, sought a more fortified position by moving his command to the supposedly secure ``island prison'' of Fort Sumter. Meanwhile, Congress debated and peace commissioners from North and South met to no effect; Secretary of State William Seward gave private assurances to Confederate emissaries that Fort Sumter would be evacuated; and Lincoln, whose inscrutability matched his inexperience, finally hit upon how to place the onus for starting the war on the new Confederate government: by providing provisions to Sumter but no reinforcements. A compelling account of the folly and brilliance displayed as the nation veered toward collapse. (2 maps, 8 pages of photos) (History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44747-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of...
Lawyer and legal scholar Gordon aims to set forth the bloody history of Nat Turner’s campaign against white slave owners and evaluate it in the context of homeland terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.
In 1831, Virginian field slave Turner and a band of other slaves and freed blacks launched a bloody battle. Their rebellion was put down within 48 hours, but not before they had managed to slaughter some 55 white men, women and children. Though the book’s title suggests that its emphasis is on the trials of Turner and his followers, Gordon spends even more pages of this slim tome meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the rebellion and sorting through the hearsay of what actually happened. Carefully footnoted, the compelling story of how a literate, religious field hand came to believe he was the second coming of the Messiah, destined to raise an army to kill his oppressors, makes an interesting read. Yet Gordon’s painstaking, and sometimes repetitive, efforts better describe the insurrection’s roots than its repercussions. The author loses momentum when he reaches what should be the payoff–how the rebels’ trials were handled. After the first few days of vigilante violence to quash the revolt, Gordon argues, due process was restored–more than a third of the accused were found innocent—and tempered with mercy, as then-Virginia Gov. John Floyd commuted many of the death sentences issued by the courts to transportation, or being sold in another state. But although Gordon details the separate, unequal justice process reserved for slaves, the parallels he draws between the Nat Turner rebellion and 9/11 are underdeveloped and belated, as much of the contemporary material is relegated to a series of appendices that feel like afterthoughts.
A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of terrorists ultimately it lacks satisfying insights.Pub Date: May 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2983-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A welcome contribution to frontier history.
A persuasive effort to locate the origins of the American Revolution not in Boston Harbor but in the dense woodlands of western Pennsylvania.
The Black Boys Rebellion, commemorated in the 1939 John Wayne vehicle Allegheny Uprising, takes its name from a Pennsylvania militia outfit’s practice of dressing in Indian garb and blackening their faces before going into the field. They had formed to battle Indian raids on what was then British America’s far western frontier. At the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the British Crown had decided to make peace with the Indian nations, in part by forbidding Americans from settling in country that they regarded as rightfully theirs. “Colonists in war-torn regions felt there could be no peace with Native Americans,” writes Spero (Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania, 2016, etc.), the librarian of the American Philosophical Society. “These colonists instead saw Native groups as threats that needed to be removed.” When the British government sent agents to the frontier to bring trade goods as peace offerings to the Natives, the militia turned their arms on their colonial masters. Although the story of their rebellion is in itself a small one relative to the larger history of the British Empire in North America, Spero does a good job of examining its implications. There was a class element, for example, in the hope of landholders to slowly settle the West “instead of permitting colonists to pursue their desire for unfettered expansion,” and there were significant differences in the attitudes of the first frontier president, Andrew Jackson, and predecessors such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in how Native peoples were to be treated. Interestingly, the author also locates an early stirring of the Second Amendment in Black Boys’ leader James Smith, who drafted the revolutionary constitution of Pennsylvania that asserted that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state.”
A welcome contribution to frontier history.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63470-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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