Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877

From its shocking curtain-raiser--the conflagration that consumed Lower Manhattan in 1835--to the climactic centennial year of 1876, with a corrupt, deadlocked presidential campaign (fought out in Florida), this sequel to Freedom Just Around the Corner carries the saga of the American people's continuous self-reinvention from the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson through the eras of Manifest Destiny, Civil War, and Reconstruction, America's first failed crusade to put "freedom on the march" through regime change and nation building. But, more than just a political history, this book presents the American epic as lived by Germans and Irish, Catholics and Jews, as well as people of British Protestant and African American stock; an epic in which Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, showman P. T. Barnum, and circus clown Dan Rice figure as prominently as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry Ward Beecher; in which railroad management and land speculation prove as gripping as Indian wars.