Wineapple's book is centered on 'ecstasy' but it begins in apprehension and ends in exhaustion. The United States of America she portrays is wracked throughout this period by extremes of ecstasy triggered by a tendency to appeal to a 'higher law' whether the subject is transcendence, religious revival, territorial expansion, or--and especially--slavery. When the book begins, in 1848, the debate over slavery had become so heated and so grounded in moral absolutes and righteous certainties that sectional conflict seemed inevitable. When the book closes in 1877, the nation's white majority are united in weariness and a desire to put the ecstatic energies of abolitionism, civil war, and a faltering civil rights movement behind them.
The narrative is framed by two funerals, each of which brought the different sections of the nation together although in very different ways. The first, in 1848, was for John Quincy Adams, and the outpouring of respect for the divisive old foe of the Slave Power and its corrosive effect on the Union could not mask the lingering fear that his dire warnings could not be ignored even after he left the stage. The second, in 1877, was for for former US Senator Charles Sumner, one of the great Congressional abolitionists of the "ecstatic era" the country was coming out of. His eulogy, by former Confederate politician-turned US Senator from Mississippi Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, implicitly called for an end of the political and social divisions that forced whites in both the North and South to acknowledge that the African Americans the Civil War had helped to free were still around, making claims to citizenship and a place in the American polity and American society. But white America was tired, and wanted to believe that this work was done. The answer to that disconnect was burying an ongoing conflict in nostalgia-toned revisionism and acceding to a new racial hierarchy which would ultimately reframe the Civil War as an unfortunate tragedy and Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster.
Wineapple is a Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, and the book is deeply informed by the literary culture of the era. This is, in many ways, a study of the culture--the zeitgeist--of a tumultuous era that came to a close when the white elite, and much of the electorate, decided that more than enough blood and treasure had been expended on "the negro question" and the values of compromise and conciliation were lauded as fundamental to rebuilding the newly unified nation. American Indians were also victims of this new, determined quest for "order" and peace, even at the expense of justice. The America of the final chapters of Wineapple's book, more than anything, wanted strife and conflict off the front pages of their newspapers. It was time to solidify the economy behind the gold standard and clean up the civil service. A continent was unified, cleansed of both slavery and indigenous people (reservations were just as invisible as the disenfranchised freeman of the South). Further triumphs in the advancement of democracy, further expansions of suffrage, would have to wait for future generations.
