Review by Booklist Review
Upon passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, Congressman George Thatcher declared that slavery--the institution bolstered by that law--was "a cancer of immense magnitude that [could] . . . destroy the body public." That malignancy defines the narrative center of Taylor's new history of the country that claimed independence in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, only to narrowly (and temporarily) avert civil war 67 years later through the Compromise of 1850. Yet even as he insistently focuses on slavery in the U.S., Taylor places it in a broader social and geopolitical context. Readers thus see how the racial attitudes that sustain slavery shape policies that drive Native American tribes from their homes. But readers also see how those holding these attitudes become anxious over the emergence of the Republic of Haiti--created by slave revolt--to the south, and over Britain's abolition of slavery in its dependency of Canada to the north, creating a new haven for fugitive slaves. In Taylor's view, it is this insecurity--not confidence in America's Manifest Destiny--that accounts for aggression in 1846 against ethnically divided and vulnerable Mexico, as slavery's champions seize territory they intend to carve into new slave states. A history that speaks directly to the racial concerns of twenty-first-century Americans.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An unstable nation deflected its seething tensions and anxieties into an aggressive expansionism, according to this trenchant history of the fledgling U.S. Pulitzer winner Taylor (American Revolutions) focuses on the growth of American territory and national power through diplomacy and wars aimed at clearing Native Americans from western land coveted by settlers, gaining new territory for slave states, and warding off Great Britain and Spain. The War of 1812, he argues, was actually part of a greater "War of the 1810s" that saw a decade of fighting from the Northwest Territory to Florida to consolidate and extend America's borders. According to Taylor, this outward-directed program ended up exacerbating internal divisions, as unpopular wars and the prospect that new states might upset the slave state-free state balance stoked sectional antagonisms. The portrait of the U.S. that emerges is not flattering: Taylor foregrounds white supremacy, sexism, slavery, the miseries of industrial capitalism, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Mexican War. This elegantly written and thoughtfully argued study shows how rickety and explosive the American project was from the start. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The newest volume in Taylor's U.S. history series, after American Revolutions, covers the post-revolutionary period through the Compromise of 1850; it counters widespread beliefs about U.S. geographic expansion. Taylor argues that the colonial push westward was driven by perceived threats to the precarious union--from distant and neighboring governments; Indigenous peoples displaced and attacked by the colonies; free and enslaved Black people; and short-lived republics developed by restive colonists. Taylor underscores the complexity of persistent U.S. instability: fear of these varied groups drove Anglo continental invasion, and each territorial advance increased regional tensions and mistrust, resulting in continual risks of disunion. Racism was an underlying cause of U.S. expansion and insecurity: see, for example, self-interested white Americans who, believing that people of color shouldn't have their own land, brutally wrested arable territory from Indigenous peoples and non-white immigrants; Southern slaveholders who perpetuated slave labor and feared rebellions by enslaved people; low-income white Southerners' whose status depended on their ranking above enslaved people; and the North's bowing to threats of Southern secession because the economy relied on cheap cotton and because, despite Northerners' theoretical abolitionism, they did not want to have Black neighbors. VERDICT This insightful and engaging survey is essential reading for scholars as well as casual readers of history.--Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The acclaimed historian offers a relevant follow-up to American Revolutions (2016). In a book that falls midway between narrative survey and classroom text, Taylor continues the story of the settlement and conquest of what became the lower 48 states. The author, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor at the University of Virginia, is among the few historians who would attempt such a history of this single century of the American past. With characteristically graceful prose, he relates the costs and limits, as well as gains and triumphs, of the nation's sweep westward after the Revolution. His subjects--events, wars, laws, treaties--will be familiar to those who paid attention in their American history courses, but Taylor presents them in fresh, thought-provoking ways. Three themes run through the book, whose basic narrative concerns the search for "elusive security." First, nothing was foreordained; many nations and peoples fought over the same territory when the American republic was weak and vulnerable. Second, based on unassailable evidence, crippling payments were exacted from non-White people in the pursuit of Manifest Destiny to conquer much of North America. Third, it wasn't all about White men; women, Native Americans, and African Americans played significant roles on all sides in the politics, military battles, land settlements, and opposition to American encroachments on others' territories. Readers will encounter many little-known characters who advanced, thwarted, honored, and sullied American ambitions. It's not a pretty picture, but such warts-and-all history is now conventional among scholars and considered more congruent with historical realities than the drum-and-trumpet stories that used to be the standard approach of historical narratives and textbooks. Though the narrative lacks an overall argument and ends in an abrupt, somewhat jarring fashion, Taylor is always a consummate guide to the early republic. A fine new look at a critical period of American history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
