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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
A Kirkus Best Book of 2013
A Bookpage Best Book of 2013
Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery. With a canvas of extraordinary characters, such as P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and L. C. Q. Lamar, Ecstatic Nation brilliantly balances cultural and political history: It's a riveting account of the sectional conflict that preceded the Civil War, and it astutely chronicles the complex aftermath of that war and Reconstruction, including the promise that women would share in a new definition of American citizenship. It takes us from photographic surveys of the Sierra Nevadas to the discovery of gold in the South Dakota hills, and it signals the painful, thrilling birth of modern America.
An epic tale by award-winning author Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation lyrically and with true originality captures the optimism, the failures, and the tragic exuberance of a renewed Republic.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This lavish record of the eventful decades surrounding the Civil War explores a divided nation through the personalities of its growing and ideologically diversifying populace. Lincoln emerges as the iconic celebrity of the era's central conflict, but the real stars are the supporting characters. Politicians, poets, slaves, slave holders, transcendentalists, Mormons, women's suffragists, and Native American chiefs are just some of the colorful characters who run the gamut from "prolific and daring and conventional" to "spare and iron-willed" and "excessive and homegrown." Acclaimed biographer Wineapple (White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) gracefully choreographs a staggering number of primary sources, weaving disparate voices together into one revelatory thread. In her depiction of the bloodshed of the Civil War, she eschews "statistics [that] defy comprehension," focusing instead on specific scenes and personal stories that capture the magnitude of a pivotal moment before fleshing them out with analyses of contemporaneous reactions. The result reads like a series of biographies-in-miniature, a marvelous survey of both familiar and unsung American stories, contextualized and framed within one sweeping canvas. This is sure to enrich any reader's understanding of the complicated history of Civil War-era America. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Its title borrowed from poet Emily Dickinson, this panorama of the Civil War era evokes the passions that presaged a war, were released by the war, and took energetic and bewildering directions after the war. By a notable literary historian, the work features vignettes of writers and journalists of the period among the parade of political and military personages, all expounding on or acting on Wineapple's dominant theme: race. Implicated in nearly every controversy between North and South from the antebellum rancor over slavery, slavery's demise in the course of armed conflict, and throughout Reconstruction race, and specifically the citizenship status of blacks, animates much of Wineapple's presentation. Including overt events like the Dred Scott decision or postwar constitutional amendments, her narratives encompass many incidents that contested the rights of blacks, incidents in law or in violence that played out against the racial feelings of officials calling the shots: for example, Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was a blunt white supremacist. With allied passages about women's rights, Indian wars, and business buccaneers, Wineapple's history creatively quavers with the tensions of the transformative times.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
So many histories of the Civil War era have been published that one would think writing another would be pretty much a matter of choosing a major political event - the Compromise of 1850, say, with its controversial Fugitive Slave Act - and then pressing cruise control. We drive on a familiar freeway that takes us through a deepening valley: the growing gulf between the North and the South during the 1850s. We view familiar scenery like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Then, suddenly, we encounter a multicar pileup: the Civil War. It is indeed tempting to piece together a narrative where everything falls neatly into place or, even if it doesn't, to imagine a sane resolution to the debate between antislavery and pro-slavery ideologues. A generation of historians known as the revisionists used their supposedly rational perspective to argue that the Civil War was "unnecessary," caused by issues that could have been solved through reasoned discussion and political compromise. That view, which was vigorously challenged in the later decades of the 20th century, has made something of a comeback in recent years among those who contend that there must have been ways in which a war that killed approximately 750,000 Americans could have been averted. If we had only gone left, not right, on that freeway, we could have avoided the smashup. In "Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877," her splendid new history of the Civil War period, Brenda Wineapple takes us on a different ride. Think the Monaco Grand Prix: zigzagging, sometimes precipitous, with hairpin turns that slow you to a crawl followed by straightaways where you reach 200. Lincoln is there, of course, along with all the other major players, but the usual dichotomies are replaced by a kaleidoscope of outsize personalities, conflicting visions and unforeseen events. In other words, Wineapple gives us history as it feels in real time: full of plans that backfire, schemes foiled by chance, outliers who suddenly change everything and happy endings that turn out to be not too happy after all. And, somehow, the whole untidy situation pushes us toward social progress. "Ecstatic Nation" is not a book with an overt agenda. Its message is delivered through its vivid portrayal of the human side of an era, following the roiling tides of emotions - erratic, shifting and ultimately overpowering. Lincoln once confessed that he didn't control events; they controlled him. But if he wasn't in control, who was? Everyone, Wineapple demonstrates. Everyone in that tumultuous time. Wineapple's title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem about "A single Continent" where "One - is the Population-/Numerous enough -/This ecstatic Nation/Seek - it is Yourself." The image reminds us of the importance of the individual in history. The nation is a motley assortment of individuals, and the individual is a mini-nation of selves. As Walt Whitman, the quintessential poet of American democracy, proclaimed in 1855, "I am large, I contain multitudes." All too often, Civil War histories are dominated by accounts of military strategy, party positions, social currents, economic trends and so on. While not ignoring such themes - indeed, her book is a reliable repository of factual information about the Civil War - Wineapple brings alive the vibrant, imperfect people behind the issues: not just the leaders in Washington and on the battlefield but the quixotic adventurers who tried to take over Cuba and Nicaragua, the pro-slavery hotheads, the fervent abolitionists, the poets, the showmen, the shysters and the spirit-rappers who conversed with the dead. Ecstatic indeed. With so many individuals bouncing off one another and gravitating to opposite sides of the slavery issue, small wonder that a blood bath resulted. Wineapple finds that, despite all sorts of political deals put on the table, polarized passions became an unstoppable force. By 1860, she writes, "a certain sense of inevitability" had overtaken the nation. "War seemed a foregone conclusion" because there was no "incentive to budge, to question one's own righteousness, to create the grounds on which a compromise might occur." There were many bold efforts to challenge slavery. The Liberty Party in the 1840s tried politics, to no avail. Another method was to reject the government altogether. That was the choice of the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution, which he considered a pro-slavery document, and urged the North to secede from the South. Another strategy was Christian persuasion, the avenue taken by Harriet Beecher Stowe in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which showed the human side of enslaved people. Yet another was individual military action, taken by John Brown, who willingly gave his life in his holy war against slavery. BUT all of these efforts, no matter how very different they were, led to slavery becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the reactionary South. One of the strengths of Wineapple's book is it shows how moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. She tells, for example, of Alexander Stephens, a temperate Georgia representative who in 1859 abandoned politics because he found himself, in his words, caught between two trains, each with a drunken engineer, headed on a collision course. Soon, however, Stephens was right back on the Southern train after being selected as the vice president of the Confederacy, which he extolled as a model society based on the "great physical, philosophical and moral truth" of the inferiority of blacks. Efforts to ward off war, Wineapple makes clear, were as fruitless in the North as in the South. Lincoln rejected the incendiary tactics of abolitionists and carefully adhered to the principles of the nation's founders. In 1858 he declared that war was not the solution to slavery, which he said might take as long as a century to disappear. But to his pro-slavery opponents Lincoln was just another devilish radical. Wineapple relates the war and its aftermath with economy and power. The four-year conflict ended slavery but could not bring a lasting resolution to the race problem. Early in Reconstruction, blacks briefly gained political ascendancy in the South with the help of Northern pressure, but then complacency set in. By 1876, Reconstruction had collapsed, and Jim Crow was beginning to be put in place. In the North, many erstwhile abolitionists abandoned their former radicalism; the few who retained it, like Wendell Phillips, Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass, became lonely prophets of a civil rights movement that would take nearly a century to rouse the nation's conscience. Wineapple makes good use of her gift - visible also in her other fine books on Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson - of communicating vast amounts of information in lively, cogent prose. She makes familiar historical figures seem fresh and unfamiliar ones seem vitally important. The result is a masterly, deeply moving record of a crucial period in American history. Wineapples history is full of foiled schemes, plans that backfíre and happy endings that are not so happy. David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include "John Brown, Abolitionist" and "Mightier Than the Sword: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the Battle for America."
Choice Review
Wineapple's engaging panorama of the Civil War era re-creates its complexity and contradictions through a collage of individuals. A country born of compromise with slavery and commitment to white supremacy growing bountiful on the proceeds of invention and expansion was torn apart by a war over slavery, and reunited through further bargaining over the continued use of national power to enforce freedmen's rights and the lure of riches in the West. Mixing familiar characters--Lincoln, Grant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton--and those less familiar to general readers--Rufus Saxton and Clarence King--Wineapple (Union College) accurately captures the contingency of outcomes from the US-Mexican War to the abandonment of Reconstruction. Technology--newspapers, the telegraph, photographs--impacted the imaginations of common citizens, hucksters, and policy makers who pursued opportunity for profit and idealistic reform. Violence--by slaves demanding freedom, by those determined to hold them, by those who would free them, by those who fought a war to determine slavery's future, and by those who would secure white supremacy and the possession of Indian lands--further suggests the complex moral landscape in which mid-19th-century Americans struggled to realize their competing visions. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. E. R. Crowther Adams State University
Kirkus Review
A sweeping look at the Civil War in the context of its social, cultural and intellectual climate. Wineapple (Modern Literary and Historical Studies/Union Coll.; White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 2008) begins with a bang: the death of John Quincy Adams on the House floor, after decades of fighting to end slavery. From there, she takes up the narrative of some 50 years of turbulent American history, full of grand schemes, bitter conflicts, brilliant characters and unforgettable stories. Among the plotlines are the effort by Southern slaveholders to find new territories to expand into, so as to preserve the balance between slave and free states in the Senate; the abolitionists' appeal to higher laws; the rise of transcendentalism, spiritualism and other quasi-religious philosophies; and the settlement of the West. It would be hard for a master novelist to top the cast of characters, who run the gamut from politicians to writers, soldiers, ministers, nurses, journalists and outright frauds. Wineapple covers the grand sweep of history, from the run-up to secession and the war itself to the Reconstruction era and its ultimate betrayal. Secondary plots abound, from plans to annex Cuba to the Indian Wars. Throw in all the quips, slogans, insults and grand sentiments of an age when educated men and women prided themselves on their eloquence, and you've got the recipe for a wonderful saga. Wineapple gives all the major players a turn in the spotlight and, in the case of the true giants of the era, Abraham Lincoln especially, their full due. The author effectively draws in all the currents of the time, from popular culture and polemical journalism to the grand literary monuments. Best of all, she brings it together in a compelling narrative that will enlighten readers new to the material and thoroughly entertain those familiar with it. History on the grand scale, orchestrated by a virtuoso.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Wineapple (Leon Levy Ctr. for Biography, CUNY Graduate Sch.; Hawthorne: A Life) paints a broad canvas of 19th-century American ideas, identities, and interests to show how compromise and common concerns fractured over slavery and other issues. Her book reveals more conceit than confidence and more confrontation than compromise by following the lives of a host of strong-minded and strong-willed men, and several women, contending for power in politics, letters, and society. Through them, Wineapple shows how private concerns became public controversies and the ways in which ideas about honor and duty informed-and then were shattered by-warmaking. She offers no new interpretive directions, but she does bring the age to life, especially through the eyes of writers. In extending her study westward, Wineapple shows an America on the make and on the move, shifting the national narrative from "the war" alone to one of the complications and contradictions of expanding freedom by conquest. Her powerful prose takes the pulse of a nation unmaking and remaking. -VERDICT Readers looking for a reliable, readable, and riveting story of the people and process of Wineapple's chosen era will find this title well worth the ride.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The End of Earth | p. 1 |
Part 1 (1848-1861) | |
1 Higher Laws | p. 15 |
2 Who Ain't a Slave? | p. 38 |
3 One Aggresses | p. 58 |
4 Democracy | p. 77 |
5 Sovereignty | p. 99 |
6 Revolutions Never Go Backward | p. 125 |
7 The Impending Crisis | p. 149 |
8 A Clank of Metal | p. 165 |
Part 2 (1861-1865) | |
9 On to Richmond | p. 197 |
10 Battle Cry of Freedom | p. 223 |
11 This Thing Now Never Seems to Stop | p. 250 |
12 The Last Full Measure of Devotion | p. 272 |
13 Fairly Won | p. 296 |
14 Armed Liberty | p. 325 |
15 And This Is Richmond | p. 351 |
16 The Simple, Fierce Deed | p. 367 |
Part 3 (1865-1876) | |
17 But Half Accomplished | p. 391 |
18 Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum | p. 411 |
19 Power | p. 430 |
20 Deep Water | p. 450 |
21 Running from the Past | p. 475 |
22 Westward the Course of Empire | p. 506 |
23 With the Ten Commandments in One Hand | p. 529 |
24 Conciliation; or, the Living | p. 559 |
Acknowledgments | p. 595 |
Notes | p. 601 |
Selected Bibliography | p. 667 |
Index | p. 695 |