Review by Choice Review
Many consider today's prevailing political hostility as unprecedented in the annals of American history. Such opinions are certain to be challenged by this new volume. Freeman (Yale) demonstrates that the partisan bickering now prevalent is mere child's play compared to the dangerously violent conditions that prevailed in Congress in the years preceding the Civil War. Southerners' honor-bound determination to defend slavery in the face of escalating criticism created an environment wherein the lawmakers of the nation overwhelmingly armed themselves for fear of physical assault. Fist fights, canings, and mortal threats were commonplace. The notorious caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks is just one example of near daily spasms of violence. Freeman contends that the first blood spilled in the Civil War was not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress and the streets and immediate environs of Washington D. C., where disputes initiated on the floors of Congress were often ultimately resolved. Freeman's lively, entertaining, and engaging narrative reveals a time when politics was truly a life endangering business. This well-researched volume will appeal to any reader interested in understanding the true meaning of dysfunction in Washington. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Samuel C. Hyde, Southeastern Louisiana University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
MY STRUGGLE: Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. (Archipelago, $33.) This hefty volume concludes the Norwegian author's mammoth autobiographical novel with lengthy exegeses on art, literature, poetry and Hitler (whose "Mein Kampf" gives Knausgaard his title). LAKE SUCCESS, by Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $28.) Shteyngart's prismatic new road-trip novel stars a Wall Street finance bro, loaded down with job and family woes, who impulsively hops on a Greyhound bus headed west. We do not root for him, but we root for his comeuppance. THE FIELD OF BLOOD: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, by Joanne B. Freeman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A noted historian uncovers the scores of brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among congressmen between 1830 and 1860. The mayhem was part of the ever-escalating tensions over slavery. OHIO, by Stephen Markley. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) This debut novel, set at a class reunion, churns with such ambitious social statements and insights - on hot-button issues of the past dozen years - that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. HIS FAVORITES, by Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $22.) A middle-aged woman recalls, haltingly, how she was groomed by a charismatic high school English teacher in this powerful novel of trauma and survival that couldn't be more timely. The looping narrative amounts to a cathartic experiment in taking control of one's own story. IMMIGRANT, MONTANA, by Amitava Kumar. (Knopf, $25.95.) Kumar's novel of a young Indian immigrant who recounts his loves lost and won as a college student in the early 1990s has the feeling of thinly veiled memoir. It's a deeply honest look at a budding intellectual's new experience of America, filled with both alienation and an aching desire to connect. PASSING FOR HUMAN: A Graphic Memoir, by Liana Finek. (Random House, $28.) Finck's cartoons in The New Yorker offer dispatches from an eccentric, anxious mind. Her memoir grapples with what it means to accept your own weirdness and separation from a world that doesn't understand you. THE WINTER SOLDIER, by Daniel Mason. (Little, Brown, $28.) In this crackling World War I novel, a young medical student is dispatched to a desolate hamlet on the Eastern Front, where he teams with a rifle-wielding nun to treat soldiers. THE ASSASSINATION OF BRANGWAIN SPURGE, by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin. (Candlewick, $24.99; ages 10 and up.) In this wildly original book (a National Book Award contender), emissaries of the feuding elf and goblin kingdoms seek peace. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks bludgeoned Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. He was avenging an insult to his relative in a speech Sumner gave about ""bleeding Kansas."" Supposedly, members of the press and public were shocked by this violent act in Congress, but Freeman, professor of American Studies at Yale, indicates that this attack was only the most publicized incident in a rising tide of violence between legislators. In most cases, slavery triggered the conflicts. Those ranged from in your face shoving matches to the brandishing of firearms to an all-out brawl. According to Freeman, these weren't all simple flashes of temper. Rather, southerners pursued a strategy of physical and verbal intimidation, believing that Yankees lacked the manliness to defend their honor. This aggression reflected the mounting violence at large over slavery. Freeman also observes that increased press coverage of Congress and ""sensationalized"" journalism exacerbated the intensity of lawmaker emotions. This is a finely researched and well-written examination of the often overlooked legislative breakdown that preceded the Civil War.--Jay Freeman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
History professor and podcaster Freeman (Affairs of Honor) excavates a little-discussed aspect of American history in this scholarly but brisk and accessible account. She draws extensively on the journals of Benjamin Brown French, who, as a clerk in the House of Representatives, had a front-row seat to the posturing, name-calling, dueling, and brawling that regularly erupted in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War. While members historically sparred along party and regional lines, the issue of slavery combined with bullying insults to various members' masculinity led to frequent intimidation and violence. The journals also detail French's transformation from an early Jacksonian Democrat to a weary Republican ready for the South's departure, paralleling the evolution of other Northerners' thinking. French's long-standing friendship with the unmemorable Franklin Pierce provides fresh insight into the political culture of the time, and the descriptions of the tragicomic Cilley-Graves duel and the horrific caning of Charles Sumner are detailed and thoughtful. Freeman writes from the northern point of view, and the Southerners read as a monolithic group of bullies. Freeman grants followers of modern politics a look back at another fascinating, impassioned period of change in which Congress became full of "distrust, defensiveness, and degradation," mimicking the constituents at home. Agent: Wendy Strothman, the Strothman Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Benjamin French, a New Hampshire native, spent more than three decades living and working in Washington, DC, first as a clerk and then clerk of the House of Representatives. Little escaped his attention, and several details were recorded in his voluminous diary. This unique source, used to great effect by historian Freeman (history, Yale Univ.; Affairs of Honor), helps to uncover the rowdy and violent behavior in the House that mirrored the wider society in the decades preceding the American Civil War. Behind the fistfights, guns, knives, and duels lied a deeper threat the author describes as a process of disunion. Southerners, with their deeply ingrained code of honor, who viewed criticism of slavery as a personal affront, bullied House members who crossed them, using duel challenges or procedural rules to silence debate. Freeman traces how regional and party differences solidified into two intractable and hostile camps. Congressional violence was but a telling symptom of the deepening sectional and political divide preceding the Civil War. VERDICT A thought-provoking and insightful read for anybody interested in American politics in the lead up to the Civil War.-Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A hair-raising history of "extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness." No, not today, but rather before and during the Civil War, when violence among members of Congress was not uncommon.According to Freeman (History and American Studies/Yale Univ.; Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, 2001, etc.), between the Jackson and Lincoln administrations, congressional sessions regularly featured "canings, duel negotiations and duels; shoving and fistfights; brandished pistols and bowie knives; wild melees in the House; and street fights with fists and the occasional brick. Not included in that number is bullying that never went beyond words." History buffs will recall the brutal 1856 caning of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner by South Carolina's Preston Brooks, but Freeman emphasizes that this was just the tip of the iceberg. She emphasizes that, aided by the three-fifths rule, the South dominated the Congress before 1860, and its quasi-aristocratic macho culture accepted dueling, gunplay, and fisticuffs long after it became pass in the North. This had only a modest effect until the 1830s, when opposition to slavery became a national issue. Abolitionist arguments made the South crazy. By 1840, any expression of anti-slavery opinions was illegal in those states, so most Southerners never encountered them. Sent to Congress, they were outraged. Since Northerners disliked duels and often compromised to preserve party unity, Southerners considered them sissies. This encouraged "bullying"Freeman's favorite termin which Southerners threatened violence, confident that opponents, knowing the threat was genuine, would yield. As the author demonstrates, this sometimes failed because pugnacious Northerners existed, and personal insults led to lost tempers and brawls. Quiet descended with secession, when Southern representatives moved to the Confederate Congress in Richmond, where, ironically, violence flourished.Freeman leans heavily on journalists and diarists to deliver a vivid portrait of a dysfunctional government thatminus the literal bloodshedhas been compared to today's but was probably worse. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
