A Disease in the Public Mind

March 18, 2013
Always a quirky, contrarian writer-historian, the prolific Fleming (Washington’s Secret War) offers what he deems a fresh take on the causes of the Civil War. But despite its subtitle, his interpretation isn’t new, and it doesn’t hold up. Fleming’s argument—that fanatics in the North and South drove the nation into avoidable conflict in 1861—was also the argument of a few mid-20th-century historians, like James G. Randall, who called the war’s belligerents a “blundering generation.” If only reason had prevailed, they wistfully regretted, slavery would have withered from within, and all would have been well. But this stance—which is Fleming’s—ignores recent scholarship, which has found that slavery likely would have endured. It also requires Fleming to ignore the war’s profound moral issue, viz. that slavery is an evil. Surely there was much fanaticism, and some slaves were raising themselves up by “mastering the technology of the South’s agriculture as well as the psychology of leadership.” Perhaps change was possible—but it would have been a creeping transformation carried out over decades on the backs of over 3 million slaves, and it would’ve deeply scarred the nation’s moral and international standing. This book can serve neither as a reliable guide to the past, nor as authoritative argument and scholarship. Agent: Deborah Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary Agency.

May 1, 2013

With the premise that the United States was the only nation to fight a large-scale war to end slavery, prolific popular historian Fleming (The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers) attempts to explain why we went about abolishing slavery in that way. Behind his approach is the idea that it need not have taken a war. He locates radical abolition in the North, stirring up hatred for Southern white men, and Southerners' irrational fear of race wars owing to what happened in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) as "diseases in the public mind" that were morally culpable for the tragedy of the Civil War. Many readers will find Fleming's criticism of abolitionist heroes such as William Lloyd Garrison, along with his nuanced position on Southern slavery, controversial. They may also locate factual errors (e.g., references to West Virginia in the 1820s long before it existed as a separate state). The author's distinction between "pilgrims" and "puritans" when describing New England culture is muddied. Finally, he ignores one of the most obvious reasons for why it took a civil war to end slavery in the United States: geography. Slavery was a sectional issue here; it did not exist as such in other nations. VERDICT Not recommended.--Michael Farrell, Reformed Theol. Seminary, Orlando, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2013
A prolific popular historian casts a harsh light on the abolitionists, insisting that their vitriolic rhetoric deserves more blame for the Civil War. In a preface, Fleming (The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, 2009, etc.) establishes his thesis and defines his terms--diseased public minds have made possible everything from the Salem witch trials to 9/11--then writes that he would like to have been an observer at John Brown's 1859 Harpers Ferry raid. Not many sentences unspool before readers realize that Fleming is no fan of Brown. In the author's view (expanded in later chapters), Brown was a lying, murdering madman, a failure at most everything he attempted. After the Harpers Ferry moments, Fleming returns to the arrival of the first slaves to America in the 17th century, then guides us slowly forward to the outbreak of the Civil War, then to Appomattox and its aftermath. Along the way, he says things that won't endear him to more liberal readers. He defends the slave-owning founders, emphasizing their ambivalence (without any commentary about, say, Sally Hemings), and alludes to research that shows there wasn't as much rape of slave women as the abolitionists averred--and that most slave owners weren't really into whipping and other fierce punishments. (He does condemn slavery, calling it "deplorable.") But John Quincy Adams, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and others--they were so intent on demonizing the South (where many did not own slaves, Fleming reminds us) that they contributed substantially to the regional polarization that eventually led to war. If only people had been more willing to talk, negotiate and compromise, writes the author. All fine, of course, unless you and yours have been enslaved for more than two centuries. At times, this thesis-driven tour employs a curious moral compass.

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April 1, 2013
Titles regularly appear that posit the cause of the American Civil Warone indication that the war has no unassailable explanation. The prolific Fleming, for decades a fixture among American historians, pinpoints public opinion as the proximate origin of the war, specifically its acquisition by 1860 of a polarized, paranoid character, pitting Northerners' fear of slave power against Southerners' terror of a race war sparked by Northern abolitionists (John Brown was their nightmare made real). Fleming recounts attitudes of prominent Founders toward slavery, emphasizing how their general recognition of its injustice never quite trended, during the early decades of the 1800s, toward emancipation. Instead of declining, the peculiar institution retrenched and expanded. Without understanding white Southerners' predicaments, Fleming argues, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison damned them, their region, and the Union. An array of Southerners' ripostes to Northern criticisms peppers Fleming's narrative of each section's exacerbating willingness to impute baleful motives to the other. Making a plausible presentation of antebellum attitudes and illusions, Fleming is sure to spark lively discussion about the Civil War.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)