America on the Brink
How the Political Struggle Over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating story of how New England Federalists threatened to dissolve the Union by making a separate peace with England during the War of 1812.
Many people would be surprised to learn that the struggle between Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party and Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party defined--and jeopardized--the political life of the early American republic. Richard Buel Jr.'s America on the Brink looks at why the Federalists, who worked so hard to consolidate the federal government before 1800, went to great lengths to subvert it after Jefferson's election. In addition to taking the side of the British in the diplomatic dance before the war, the Federalists did everything they could to impede the prosecution of the war, even threatening the Madison Administration with a separate peace for New England in 1814.
Readers fascinated by the world of the Founding Fathers will come away from this riveting account with a new appreciation for how close the new nation came to falling apart almost fifty years before the Civil War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Attempting to "show modern readers how the Federalists appeared to their contemporaries," Buel, a professor of history at Wesleyan University, constructs a dense narrative of the events before and during the War of 1812. He conveys the volatile local character of political discourse through ample quotations from contemporary writings and offers a cogent distillation of the political, economic and legal complexities of the era. In so doing, he calls into question the tendency of modern historians to view the Federalists as "misunderstood harbingers of the future" or "prophets of the modern state." He presents instead a portrait of them as failed leaders who would be remembered in the decades following the war "more for the challenge they had posed to the nation's republican institutions than anything else." Although the book is clearly an academic exploration of these issues (as its 40 pages of endnotes attests), there is much here to reward amateur historians and casual readers. The luminaries of the era were larger than life personalities; Buel (In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy) captures such men as Josiah Quincy, Harrison Gray Otis, James Madison and James Monroe vividly, through both apt citations and well-chosen anecdotes. In addition, the issues at stake-the relation between states and the federal government, the Constitutional and moral grounds for war, and the place of dissent in the American political landscape-are subjects of perennial interest.
