Lessons From History Biographies

Petty grudges and personal feuds can destroy promising futures.     Once in a blue moon I manage to get over to our neighborhood used bookstore and find older gems that I missed along the way (an experience I highly recommend for book lovers everywhere). On a recent journey there I stumbled on Thomas Fleming's 1999 book Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America , a topic I knew embarrassingly little about given the public adoration of the Hamilton play! I actually had encountered Fleming himself several years back through his fascinating book The Illusion of Victory , a revisionist take on World War I that essentially argued America's entire participation in that war had been a disastrous mistake, a topic that is still very much open to debate amongst historians. Reading Duel , I gained fascinating insight on the most famous murder of the Revolutionary war generation, and in particular on just how pointless and destructive personal grudges can be in the l...

  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...