The Victorian Internet

Tom Standage. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers. New York: Berkley Books, 1998.

Standage published this brief popular history of the rise and fall of the telegraph with an obvious focus on the parallels between the "Victorian internet" and the modern internet which was still a novelty for most of the public in the late 90s. As a science and technology journalist, he was most interested in how then-contemporary events mirrored an earlier communications revolution that first created a 'wired' world. His interest, then, was somewhat cautionary; although he doesn't belabor the point, he clearly wishes to warn technophiles not to go overboard with expectations about what changes the internet could--and likely would--bring forth.

That is not to say that this is bad history; Standage is a fine writer with a journalist's eye for telling detail and interest-grabbing anecdotes, but he also knows enough to ground both the beginning and the end of telegraphy's 'golden age' in prior and subsequent developments. This is still a story of change over time, grounded in facts derived from primary sources.

Therefore, while there might be little deep historical analysis, the essential narrative here is clear and concise; for readers who just need a brief outline of the basics of the history of what was once the communications wonder of the world, this somewhat dated but still enjoyable book will serve admirably.

Mapping the Nation

Susan Schulten. Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Schulten's short book is tied to an online supplement, http://www.mappingthenation.com/, and given that the subject of the book is the rise of historical mapping and thematic cartography in nineteenth-century America, it is best appreciated by frequent reference to the many visually arresting maps on the website. If this was a cost-saving measure, it was a wise one as it would have greatly increased the price of the book to include full-color reproductions of all the images included.

The book is divided into two parts, "Mapping the Past" and "Mapping the Present." Part one recounts the rise of the concept of the "historical atlas" not just as a way to document the past of maps but a way for a new nation to create a historical "national" past. The collection of older maps, then, became a way to validate the territorial pretenses of the United States.

Part two recounts the rise of thematic mapping, and its role in creating a national perspective for Americans and their government. The rise of statistical study to produce raw data and new ways to quantify reality, the development of lithography which allowed for the fast and affordable reproduction of maps for a broad audience, and various national crises (including the issue of slavery, the Civil War, epidemic disease outbreaks, Westward expansion and the fate of American Indians) promoted the rise of new, map-oriented experts who sought to create maps that both illustrated reality and served as tools of inquiry.

A little-appreciated aspect of American history which is well served by the author. Highly recommended.

The Internal Enemy

Alan Taylor. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Alan Taylor's last two books--The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, and The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, were both excellent examples of borderland history. Given that this book is set in Virginia, at the heart of the early American Republic, it may seem that his latest work has moved on from that emphasis. But the "Virginia" of the title is really, in many ways, the Chesapeake watershed, and the larger time frame of the title actually frames the much more condensed period when the core of this books' action takes place--the War of 1812. Taylor recounts the history of the British military policy of accepting--and eventually seeking out and encouraging--runaway slaves as military strategy. First tried on a limited scale towards the end of the Revolution, the policy was revived during the War of 1812. The policy had enormous repercussions both for enslaved people and for white Virginians far out of proportion to the actual number of slaves who did manage to escape. This is, in other words, a different kind of "borderland history"--one where the frontier was waterborne, but also where the zone of interaction involved not only competing sovereign entities but also conflicting notions of freedom.

Taylor makes clear the extent to which slaves in the Chesapeake region had intimate knowledge of the regional terrain, as well as nocturnal freedom of movement within their larger neighborhoods that their white owners and neighbors neither fully understood nor controlled. Slaves, forced to work under supervision and duress during the daytime, took advantage of nighttime darkness to carry out visits to neighboring farms and plantations to maintain family ties and other relationships, as well as to carry out social and religious functions and obtain extra foodstuffs and other supplies through theft, pilfering, and other covert means.

Because of this--as well as the fact that many slaves were employed as fishermen, pilots, and sailors--runaway slaves had real military value to the British forces patrolling the Chesapeake. The British sought not only to maintain a blockade, but also to engage in constant raiding in order to acquire needed supplies as well as demoralize and punish Virginian Republicans. Regarding the latter--the British commanders were able to obtain detailed information about the political loyalties of individual Americans, and therefore could choose to punish Republicans for presumably supporting the war effort while sparing Federalists who presumably opposed it. This divide-and-conquer strategy sought to pacify the local population, many of whom were distressed at the failure of the Federal government to provide protection, and thereby undermine American resolve.

This strategy heavily relied on the help of runaway slaves for information, scouting, and providing guidance through tangled waterways and hidden pathways through the countryside. But while the British initially only wanted a handful of individual slaves, particularly pilots, the slaves themselves had other ideas. Family ties were very important to slaves, and given that the declining economy in Virginia had hastened the breakup of slave families through sales of individual slaves further west and south, many slaves realized that if they did not rescue their family members right away, their families could be split apart for good.

So the impetus to escape as family units rather than as individuals was not only strong, it was urgent. The British eventually made a positive of the situation, embracing the idea that all runaways became free once they reached the 'sovereign territory' of a British warship as both a moral good and excellent propaganda to use against the hypocritical Americans, who claimed to fight for freedom while doing everything in their power to keep their slaves from achieving freedom for themselves.

Eventually, the British commanders in the area would create a special corps of marines from these runaways, a military unit which fought with great effectiveness and contributed greatly to British success in the region--culminating in the sack of Washington, DC.

The larger story Taylor tells is how these events fueled the pathological fears of slave revolts which were a constant subtext to Virginia's slave-holding culture, and which eventually doomed emancipation in the state and led more and more white Virginians to silence and abandon earlier qualms about the institution in favor of a more hardline pro-slavery stance, or at least a cynical accommodation to its continued necessity. Only a few thousand slaves managed to escape to the British during this time, but the psychological blow to white Virginians sense of security--as well as to the comforting myths of slaves as docile, content, and weak--was immense.

Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism

Douglas R. Egerton. Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

This is the only full-length biography of 19th century Virginia politician Charles Fenton Mercer. Born in 1778, Mercer was a younger generation Federalist-turned-Whig who represented Loudoun County in the House of Delegates and then a northern Virginia district including Loudoun and surrounding counties in the US House of Representatives from 1817 through 1839. He was an important political figure at the time, and Egerton notes that he had an impressive legislative record given that he spent most of his career as a member of a minority party who was usually at odds with majority sentiment in his home state.

Egerton argues that Mercer was an exemplary Whig, perhaps truer to the core principles of the party than more famous figures such as Henry Clay. This was partly due to his ideological and political integrity, and partly to the fact that he represented a "safe" district and could afford to go against the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian majority. His understanding of what would become the American System was nuanced and refined--he saw internal improvements, central banking, a protective tariff, public education, and the colonization of free African-Americans not as disparate economic or reform agendas but as complementary aspects of a comprehensive system.

This system, Egerton argues, was fundamentally conservative. He argues that the modern reinterpretation of the Whigs as optimistic proto-liberals is deeply flawed, and he uses this study of the life and career of this deeply pessimistic, even fatalistic, man to make that argument. Largely, he succeeds--Mercer's statist conservatism accommodated democracy and the "common man" in rhetoric but not in substance. Egerton notes that Mercer's interest in education was as a form of social control of the lower classes--Mercer sensed the social changes that industrialization would bring, and he feared them. Likewise, African colonization of free blacks was not in any way an exercise in nascent abolitionism (no matter what Mercer's often vicious Southern critics often charged), but rather an attempt to rather crudely purge the black "lower class" from American society.

Mercer's political career is noteworthy in Virginia history for his role in the creation of the Fund for Internal Improvements and the Board of Public Works, and nationally for the creation of the American Colonization Society. He fought many losing battles, and seemingly died feeling himself a failure, but in this book Egerton largely succeeds in extracting a larger story about the way in which American conservatism survived the collapse of Federalism and adjusted to the democratic realities of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Rise of American Democracy

Sean Wilentz. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Wilentz has written a history of the development and evolution of the American ideal of democracy over the course of several decades that simultaneously covers a lot of ground while in same ways remaining narrow in focus. The time span is implied in the subtitle--From the rise of Thomas Jefferson the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

After a brief consideration of the Federalist period immediately after ratification of the Constitution, the focus shifts to the Jefferson administration and how the Jeffersonian Republicans coped with their own ideological assumptions--forged in political battles with the Federalists and the conservative hierarchies they represented--as well as with the lingering "country" and "city" democracies which had been stirred up by the Revolution and which continued to flare up from time to time in response to political shifts. The book traces this democratic heritage through the decline of the Federalists, the split between "Democratic" and "National" Republicans, and onto the rise of the Jacksonian Democracy. 

Jackson looms large in this book, which in some ways appears to be Wilentz’s attempt to defend and update Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson for the 21^st century. Although Wilentz is sympathetic to the racial (and, to a much lesser degree, gender) inequities inherent in Jacksonian Democracy, he spends a lot more time defending Jackson’s legacy than in critiquing it, and Old Hickory and his political heirs (Martin Van Buren could not complain too much about his treatment here) generally get the benefit of the doubt in any political battle or ideological conflict.

That said, Wilentz does give the Whigs a more sympathetic hearing than he afforded the Federalists, and acknowledges that the Jacksonians managed to neither fully encompass the democratic yearnings of their era nor address the logical inconsistencies in some of their actions and beliefs.

Hovering over all of this was the institution of slavery and the questions it raised about the meaning and the limits of American democracy. Those contradictions and challenges would ultimately destroy the Whig party completely and split the Democracy in two.

If not already clear, it should be noted that the way in which this hefty study is narrow in focus is this—Wilentz has written an unapologetically political history of the period, which means that it is top-down in focus and pays little mind to the broader tapestry of social and cultural history. While perhaps unfashionable, this is appropriate given Wilentz’s assertion that 19^th century Americans located the center of their social and cultural arguments within the political realm. Politics were central to questions of what it meant to be American. It was a different world than the one we live in, and we can only begin to understand it if we try to see it as contemporaries did.

The Trial

Sadakat Kadri. The Trial: Four Thousand Years of Courtroom Drama. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.

Sadakat Kadri studied history in the United Kingdom ane law in both the U.K. and the United States, and has worked as a lawyer in multiple countries in cases concerning international law and human rights. His experience and knowledge are complemented with diligent research and a deft, often dryly humorous writing style in this book. The Trial is a sweeping yet brisk consideration of the long, convoluted history of the modern jury trial that is common in much of the Anglo world.

Although the book begins "In the Beginning" with a consideration of the justice of the ancient Near East (including the ideals of the Old Testament) and the ancient Greeks, and concludes with a consideration of recent high-profile trials, it is organized thematically rather than chronologically. The narrative flows fairly smoothly from chapter to chapter; Kadri does a rather good job of guiding the reader from a consideration of medieval trials of inanimate objects to the Moscow Show Trials of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Throughout the book, Kadri is concerned with the social and cultural meaning of the jury trial, of its forms and rituals, particularly in relation to the greater public. This is not primarily a legal history, but a cultural one. He also draws the reader to consider how the strengths and weaknesses of the jury trial were arrived at through long development rather than deliberate invention; unforeseen consequences are rife in his telling.

This is a fantastic work of popular history. Recommended for all readers.

Forcing the Issue

William Lee Miller. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

One problem with the history of the Antebellum period is that it is defined--both in terminology and in the public mind--by what came next; yet at the same time, in the public mind the Civil War is not so much the end product of decades of deliberate agitation in a context of an increasingly stark sectional division as a sudden event that negated everything that came before.

Miller's book is an account of the long campaign for free speech fought in Congress by John Quincy Adams and eventually some allies. Specifically, for the right of anti-slavery petitions from citizens to be heard in the House of Representatives. This entirely parliamentary battle preceded not only the Civil War by more than two decades, it also came before the increasingly heated and open political arguments which came in the decade just prior to the war.

This particular battle--bloodless, sometimes carried out in obtuse parliamentary jargon, and ostensibly concerned with issues of free speech about slavery rather than slavery itself--has understandably failed to register in the public consciousness, However, Miller makes an excellent argument that the debate, and particularly John Quincy Adams leading role in it, deserves to be more widely known.

The battles to come would be more intense, more explicitly about slavery, and ultimately much more deadly. But this extended legislative battle was an important step along the way, and Miller deserves credit both for bringing it to life and making a mostly-forgotten parliamentary battle into a fairly gripping narrative.

Stumbling over Slavery on the way to the Yeoman's Republic

Roger G. Kennedy. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

In the appendix to this thought-provoking study, Roger Kennedy mentions that his original plan for the book would have mandated a much longer work; as it is this study seems longer than it is. Or perhaps I should say "denser"; the book is not a chore to read. Kennedy is an entertaining stylist, and the story he is telling is compelling and rewards attention. But he is trying to tell a seemingly familiar tale (the Louisiana Purchase and its roles in the spread of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century) through a novel interpretive approach. Namely, the leading role Jefferson played in opening the new land to slavery by precluding the possibility of  multi-racial yeoman farming.

This is also an environmental history, as Kennedy returns again and again to the damage that plantation slavery agriculture inflicted on the landscape of the American South. This is somewhat ironic given Jefferson's well-documented interest in the theory that working the land developed virtue--thus, his oft-quoted belief that the nation would be best served by spreading as a nation of independent small farmers.

The chapters are broken up into many very short, very specific thematic sections; this allows the text to gain thematic depth and richness, but while Kennedy is an able wordsmith sometimes the narrative it a little hard for the general reader to discern; Kennedy assumes a level of basic knowledge that not every reader might possess.

It would be very difficult to summarize this book briefly; there is simply a lot here to mull over. The ways in which Jefferson and Madison tacitly utilized filibustering and other quasi-national adventuring to extend American sovereignty into former Spanish possessions are just one example of how Kennedy manages to alter the perspective of how the Louisiana Purchase came about. This is a book any student of the era would benefit from studying.

Highly recommended.

Manifest Destinies

Steven E. Woodworth. Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Steven E. Woodworth is a well-regarded historian who has written extensively on the Civil War. His background in military history is clear in this book, a history of the 1840s which devotes nearly half its length to a fairly detailed account of the Mexican-American War. Woodworth is at his best in this section; he is an able prose stylist and has a knack for summarizing tactical and strategic movements as well as humanizing his narrative with seemingly well-chosen observations, quotes, and anecdotes. Woodworth takes his subject seriously without being portentous or solemn.

The thesis of his book is that in 1840, the moral and ethical contradictions of a democratic republic that practiced slavery had been largely subsumed in the two-party system. Many major religious denominations had split along sectional lines over the slavery issue, but the two-party system managed to keep political tensions under control. By 1850, that fragile balance had been severely undermined. The acquisition of the North American continent west of the Louisiana Purchase, and the rapid peopling of California in the wake of the discovery of gold, forced policy makers and the public to confront the issue of the spread of slavery in new states and territories. The book ends with the Compromise of 1850, which rather put off the issue rather than truly settling it.

None of this is particularly controversial or new; Woodworth is writing for a general audience and he is certainly an able enough writer to be up to the task. But he doesn't have much new or insightful to add. His view of the Whig Party in general, as well as of Henry Clay, seems a bit dated. Dismissing the Whigs because of the admittedly superficial nature of their only two successful Presidential campaigns makes sense on the surface, but ignores that those elections took place in a context in which the voters were already well aware of Whig policies; the campaign rhetoric might indeed have been tawdry and content-free, but most voters and certainly most party regulars had more substantive reasons for their support. And it seems a bit unfair that Woodworth relies so strongly on Robert Remini's biography of Henry Clay yet uses it to support a much less flattering view of the man.

Another issue is his tendency to make too strong a parallel between events in the book and his interpretation of contemporary history and culture. It is one thing to find commonalities in American history over time and to find linkages between past and current events, but Woodworth's conservatism and religious convictions sometimes lead him to make sweeping pronouncements about what Americans as a whole believe, or do. There is nothing wrong with bringing one's own ideological beliefs into historical inquiry, but sometimes his eagerness to do so seems to cloud his judgement. His assertion that the gradualist abolitionists such as Lewis Tappan followed an approach which was "more practical and political than that of the Garrisonians" (47) seems to be a reaction to Garrison's break with mainstream evangelical Christians, who figure larger in Woodworth's narrative than they might deserve. He claims this is because Garrison was wrong and the moderates were right about the Constitution--that it was not, as he claimed, a fundamentally pro-slavery document, but rather that it was flawed but fundamentally anti-slavery. Woodworth does not elaborate on this assertion, which ignores the fact that it took two Amendments and the Civil War to get rid of slavery within the framework of that supposedly "anti-slavery" document.

This book isn't bad despite its flaws, and general readers eager for an implicitly conservative view of this period in American history which does not get as much attention from popular historians as it should will probably find much to like here. Readers who know the era better--who have a more nuanced understanding of the Whig Party, or the Panic of 1837--won't get much out of it. I would be interested in reading some of his works on the Civil War; I suspect he knows the literature and his primary sources better, and as noted above he seems an able military historian.