Lessons From History Biographies

  Without clear-headed and moral leadership, the loudest and most emotional voices win.           Robert Merry’s Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 is an excellent new study on the political chaos of the 1850’s, that fascinating and crucial decade where the original American nation collapsed into regional conflict, and set up a civil war that built a new American nation on its ashes. Merry focuses his study on the leaders of Massachusetts and South Carolina, the two states which were famously at the leading edges of abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, respectively. One clear lesson which becomes obvious from Merry’s work is that a clear factor in the disintegration of the antebellum political order, was the complete lack of competent national leadership, as a series of ineffectual presidents in the 1850’s completely failed to unify the country behind any kind of clear nationa...