To Save Us All from Slavery's Power
A dramatic reappraisal and retelling of the destruction of the American Union
To Save Us All from Slavery’s Power is a novel assessment of the culmination of the sectional crisis before the Civil War. It is a story of mutual misunderstanding, journalistic mendacity, and irreconcilable visions of the country’s future. With threats of disunion and rebellion rising in a thunderous chorus from the South in 1860, how could Republicans not have believed them until it was too late?
As Summers shows, Republicans in 1860 found it difficult to take the disunionist threat seriously because they knew that their party posed no imminent danger to slavery where it existed. But by then Americans were living in different political realities, and white Southerners could not see Republicans as anything less than an existential threat. To Save Us All from Slavery’s Power describes in dramatic detail how negative perceptions between the sections festered, and how the antagonism between them reached, and then went past, the breaking point.
- Adam I. P. Smith, Director of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, author of The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865This book makes an argument with significant implications for our understanding of the United States' collapse into war. Written in a pacey, engaging style, it is filled with interesting vignettes and perceptive observations. Summers conveys quite thrillingly the uncertainty of the election year, and the contingency of political choices. He is especially good at explaining how information was filtered through partisan lenses, generating mutual incomprehension.
- Michael Fitzgerald, St. Olaf College, author of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton SouthMark Summers showcases the funhouse mirror aspect of his work, relative to our own time. The partisan press misread what opponents were doing and thinking, and Northern and Southern misperceptions fed directly into the outbreak of Civil War. Summers draws contemporary comparisons cautiously, but readers will be struck with how relevant and scary his story is for us today.
Mark Wahlgren Summers is the Thomas D. Clark Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and the author of numerous books, including The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction.
