Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Penguin Press), by Gordon S. Wood
Among the interesting and little known facts turned up by Gordon S. Wood in Friends Divided is how poisonous was America’s poisonous political climate in the republic’s early days. Mobs of Republicans and Federalists, the nation’s original two parties, fought in the streets as friendships dissolved and people were fired for taking sides. Riots broke out in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital; newspaper offices were attacked; the presidential residence was threatened.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on opposite sides. A Brown University history professor, Wood sketches out the similarities and differences between the opposing founding fathers, a matter of incompatible temperaments as well as profoundly different philosophies of human nature. Adams was more pessimistic, believing a strong government was required for “constraining, controlling, and balancing the human passions of ambition, envy, and jealousy.” Jefferson’s small-government views were like those of the future Confederacy and would provide comfort to today’s right with his prattling over judicial activism. Although troubled by slavery, Jefferson became its great defender against Northerners, such as Adams, who hoped to curb its spread.
A happy ending: bitter rivals through much of their years of public service, Jefferson and Adams became friends late in life.
The Madog War: A Story of the Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (University of Nebraska Press), by Robert Aquinas McNally
Although few today remember the Madog War (1872-73), the struggle between the U.S. Army and a small band of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest drew international attention at the time. In The Madog War, Robert Aquinas McNally investigates the clash between the Madogs, determined to retain their semi-nomadic ways, and settlers who viewed them as obstacles. The war began when U.S. cavalry tried to drive the tribe onto a reservation; the survivors of the raid vowed vengeance against the whites. Writing with clarity and gravity, McNally details the war and its short-term consequences; the Indians fought well but were doomed in the face of a civilization with numbers, technology and an entitled sense of manifest destiny on its side.
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Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (W.W. Norton), by Richard Aldous
The day after the Kennedy assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was at his typewriter with history on his mind. The Harvard University professor, part of the “best and brightest” team assembled by JFK, was already working to forge the dead president’s legacy. In Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian, Richard Aldous engagingly reconstructs the story of a man from a prominent academic family in an era when academics helped set the national agenda. Schlesinger was a leader in the anti-Communist left, eager to shape contemporary politics through his understanding of the past. He was a patrician reformer, a fierce critic of Richard Nixon and an influential writer who coined phrases that became intellectual currency.
The Strategy of Victory: How General George Washington Won the American Revolution (Da Capo Press), by Thomas Fleming
There was no certainty about American victory in the American Revolution. As Thomas Fleming writes in The Strategy of Victory, independence was won only in part with inspiring words. Musket balls did the rest and if a general of lower caliber than George Washington had led U.S. forces, the British might have won. Describing him as a “thinking general,” Fleming follows Washington on the long campaign from north to south battling his own politicians almost as much as the Royal Army. His first problem was in shaping a motley assortment of recruits, many with vague loyalties, into a coherent army. Washington’s carefully cultivated image inspired confidence as he fought a “protracted war with immense patience and skill.”
