Review: "Charles Sumner," Zaakir Tameez

By Paul Carrier

Many notable political figures made names for themselves in mid 19th-century America, but only one is best remembered for being viciously attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That claim to fame understandably but unfortunately overshadows the fact that the victim played a highly significant role in fighting slavery, racism and segregation.

On May 22, 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a pro-slavery Democrat, used a gold-topped cane to repeatedly bash Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, beating him so badly that Sumner lost consciousness and almost died. He was unable to resume his duties until late 1859, but Massachusetts refused to fill his seat during the interim, to assure that his empty chair underscored the horrific nature of the attack.

Zaakir Tameez explores that incident in a 2025 biography of Sumner entitled Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. As that subtitle makes clear, Tameez offers a comprehensive examination of Sumner’s life, introducing a Harvard-educated attorney and Radical Republican politician who was both a dazzling legal scholar (though an unhappy practicing attorney) and a passionate champion of racial justice.

Tameez states at the outset that his biography is a warts-and-all portrayal. Sumner made little or no effort to negotiate with fellow lawmakers, even when doing so might have helped him achieve his goals. Despite his fervent devotion to bettering the lives of African Americans, he showed no real interest in the needs of Indigenous people. Nor did he champion voting rights for women. He even suggested that the United States should be expanded to include the rest of North America.

Sumner was born in Boston in 1811 and raised in what was then a predominantly Black section of  Beacon Hill. The family was not well-to-do. His mother was a seamstress and homemaker. His father, a Harvard graduate and abolitionist, served at various times as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a working attorney, and sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Brilliant and high-minded, the younger Sumner initially steered clear of the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison. But by 1845, when Sumner delivered a Fourth of July address to Boston’s movers and shakers, he proudly embraced pacifism as war loomed with Mexico and backed the abolition of slavery, to free people guilty of nothing more than “skin not colored as our own.”

The Massachusetts Legislature sent Sumner to the U.S. Senate in 1851. (Voters did not win the right to elect U.S. senators until 1913.) Sumner got off to a slow start in Washington, but he outraged slavery’s supporters and galvanized abolitionists with a scathing attack on slavery during an hours-long speech on the Senate floor in 1852. Tameez says Sumner, who was no shrinking violet, displayed “grandiosity” and “haughtiness.” He was bombastic, unapologetic and a “frighteningly erudite champion” of the enslaved.

The passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which purported to  allow voters in Kansas to decide if that territory would be slave or free, quickly degenerated into a bloodbath that resulted in an autocratic pro-slavery faction assuming control of the region. That further infuriated the already outraged Sumner, who delivered his blistering “Crime Against Kansas” speech over two days in 1856. It was shortly thereafter that Brooks caned Sumner, attacking him so feverishly that the cane broke into pieces.

Sumner appears to have been a force of nature. Seemingly humorless, almost always uncompromising and often petulant, he did not shy away from verbally pummeling pro-slavery senators by name during Senate sessions. And following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Sumner antagonized moderate abolitionists who sought to compromise with the South to avert secession. He viewed abolishing slavery as an even greater good  than preserving the Union.

Once Lincoln took office, Sumner badgered him to free the slaves before Lincoln was prepared to do so. Sumner could be unrestrained in his face-to-face meetings with Lincoln, and Tameez writes that “heated fights” between the two men were common. But their “bewildering relationship became one of Washington’s most important and consequential friendships during the Civil War.”

By 1863, Sumner was “at the height of his power in Washington,” Tameez writes. Initially seen as a “foolish youth wasting his brilliance on a hopeless cause,” he emerged as “a battle-scarred political veteran, proven to have been right all along.” In fact, Tameez writes, the 1856 attack that nearly killed him represented “the first blows of the Civil War.” In time, Sumner came to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, maintain close friendships with Lincoln and the first lady, and gain easy access to Lincoln’s Cabinet.

Following the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, Sumner continued his crusade against racism, arguing in the Senate that freedom for former slaves had little value without guarantees of equality as well, including voting rights and integration. That placed him at odds not only with some of his fellow Radical Republicans but also with President Andrew Johnson, who “grew to hate Sumner,” Tameez writes.

The period that followed was eventful for Sumner, politically and personally. The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was enacted in December 1865, followed by two related amendments later in that decade. In 1866, Sumner, by then in his 50s, married Boston widow and socialite Alice Hooper, who was half his age. The marriage was a disaster. In 1868, the Senate failed to remove Johnson from office following his impeachment in the House. Later that year, voters chose Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Johnson as president. As the 1860s drew to a close and a new decade dawned, Reconstruction remained contentious.

Both Sumner and Grant were Republicans but they had never been allies, and by 1872, when Grant sought reelection, they were openly hostile toward one another. Hoping to block Grant, Sumner shocked many Republicans by urging Black voters to support Horace Greeley, the presidential candidate backed by the spin-off Liberal Republican Party and the Democratic Party. A onetime abolitionist with mercurial political views, Greeley was a white supremacist by 1872. Grant won a second term.

Even as his health deteriorated and his fellow Republicans moved on to other issues, Sumner continued to insist that more be done to protect Blacks in the South and that schools, theaters, hotels, streetecars, restaurants, etc. be integrated to create a multiracial society. But he failed to get his civil rights bill through Congress. A truncated version eventually became law after his death, yet racial gains were largely erased with the eventual demise of Reconstruction and the vicious, often deadly rise of Jim Crow.

Such setbacks cannot detract from Sumner’s accomplishments, however, even though he was unable to do all that he had hoped and the country later regressed before it advanced anew. The author notes that Sumner “helped to abolish chattel slavery, transform the Constitution, enfranchise millions of people, and, ever so briefly, reconstruct the republic.”

Sumner passed away on March 11, 1874 in his Washington home and was buried several days later in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his final moments, Sumner instructed Ebenezer Hoar, a Massachusetts congressman and longtime friend, to tell Ralph Waldo Emerson that “I love him and revere him.” Recalling what Emerson had said about Sumner after the 1856 attack, Hoar replied: “i will tell him that you love him and revere him, for he said to me that you have the largest soul of any man alive.”

Review: "Mark Twain," Ron Chernow

By Paul Carrier

You might believe that you cannot possibly have enough interest in Mark Twain to read a 1,000-page biography of him. Until, that is, you have read a 1,000-page biography of him.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was such a fascinating blend of brilliance, bravado and balderdash that a biographer as skilled as Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, etc.) should be able to craft a mesmerizing chronicle of such an engrossing character. Sure enough, Chernow delivers.                                

Mark Twain seemingly documents every facet of its subject’s life, including his literary genius, biting wit, luxurious tastes, mercurial nature and pigheaded foolishness. Not surprisingly, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, two of Twain’s most memorable creations, bear a startling resemblance to the young Clemens. As one chapter heading in Mark Twain puts it, Clemens was “a wild and mischievous boy” who, in his own words, retained his “appetite for notice and notoriety” into adulthood.

Best known for his literary output, Twain is perhaps underappreciated for other aspects of  his multifarious life. He briefly served as a soldier of sorts in a rebel militia unit at the start of the Civil War,  worked in print shops, and was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi (which Twain later recalled as his “darling existence”). He held various newspaper jobs as a reporter whose articles often read like satire rather than news. He even tried his hand at prospecting in Nevada. (It didn’t go well.)

Twain made an early name for himself as a traveler, humorist and successful author who “fairly invented our celebrity culture,” according to Chernow. Notoriety followed the publication, in the 1860s, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (a short story) and The Innocents Abroad, an antic, book-length chronicle of Twain’s voyage through Europe and the Holy Land. Subsequent novels, notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), made an even more lasting impression.

Chernow is nuanced in examining Twain’s use of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn and that novel’s characterization of the runaway slave Jim. Chernow notes that while the upstanding residents of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s hometown, held sway in Tom Sawyer, that hierarchy is upended in Huckleberry Finn. There, it is the outcasts, Huck and Jim, who emerge as the principled characters.

Twain was an unpredictable fellow, to say the least. He was charming and genial when it suited him, especially on the lecture circuit. But Chernow explains that Twain was “an iconoclast to the core.” He could be irascible, acerbic, volatile, highly critical and prone to fits of anger. Overly trusting of others, he became vengeful when wronged. Yet he was a doting father to his three daughters when they were children and a devoted husband to his wife, Livy (Olivia Langdon), whom he adored.

The greatest comic of his day combined laugh-out-loud jocularity with a caustic outlook and unorthodox views. Twain, who was no fan of Christianity, described Jesus as the only true Christian in human history. He poked fun at the concept of Noah’s Ark, writing that Noah would have had to collect 146,000 birds, beasts and fish and 2 million insects requiring ”a fleet of Arks,” and the stench aboard the boats would have been unbearable. Twain quipped that when one deceased human arrived in heaven, a confused clerk there had to consult an enormous map to pinpoint the location of Earth (known in heaven as the wart), because our planet is completely  inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

A man with contradictory impulses, Twain strongly supported women’s suffrage but had a lukewarm attitude toward Reconstruction. He grew up in poverty and had a lifelong fear of sinking back into it, which fueled an unfortunate knack for making notoriously bad investments to get rich. Twain was a master of wishful thinking in such cases. He heavily funded an experimental typesetting machine that was supposed to revolutionize printing. It didn’t work as promised. The venture collapsed and Twain lost a fortune.

Branching out into publishing, Twain took yet another wrong turn. His success in persuading Ulysses S. Grant to let him publish his memoirs was a boon for Twain because the memoirs sold so well they lifted Twain out of debt. But he interpreted that win as proof that he had what Chernow calls “a magnificent head for publishing,” which wasn’t remotely true. Twain the publisher turned his back on writing for quite some time, eventually filing for bankruptcy and heading back to both his writing table and the lecture circuit, to pay off substantial debts. He might never have regained his financial footing without the help of Henry H. Rogers, a sympathetic oil baron.

Over the years, Twain and his family became globe-trotters who dabbled in foreign languages and traveled in elite circles, thanks to Twain’s international celebrity. Later still, back home in America, Twain emerged as a highly vocal critic of what he decried as American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. He vigorously condemned autocratic rulers and became a vocal critic of racism and anti-Semitism. 

Chernow's biography is exhaustive but far from exhausting. Twain and his family lived lives that ranged from the gloriously serene to the unbearably tragic. A son died in infancy. The oldest of his three daughters died at 24. His middle daughter had sporadic psychological problems and his youngest daughter developed epilepsy. His wife, a profoundly stabilizing influence in Twain's life, was frail and sickly for years until she died at 58.

Mark Twain makes for difficult reading as its subject stumbles into his 70s because of Twain’s behavior. He developed a creepy (but seemingly non-sexual) obsession with young girls and took a hands-off approach to the needs of his adult daughters. Twain gave his overworked secretary and a scheming business associate far too much control over his affairs, with unfortunate results. He seemed oblivious to power grabs and personality clashes within his inner circle.

Chernow writes that Twain became increasingly nostalgic as he aged. “The paradox of Twain’s life was that the older and more famous he became and the grander his horizons, the more he pined for the vanished paradise of his early years.” As Chernow illustrates in Mark Twain, that wild kid from Hannibal left a remarkable legacy for biographers over the course of his 74 years.

Review: "Making the Presidency," Lindsay M. Chervinsky

By Paul Carrier

We think we live in an age of unprecedented partisanship and skulduggery, and it’s true. Except for the “unprecedented” part.

America was awash in viciously unscrupulous political antics as far back as the early years of the republic, as historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky shows in Making the Presidency, as examination of John Adams’ single, underappreciated term as the country’s second president.

But that is only one facet of Chervinsky’s book, whose central theme is this: Adams, who succeeded George Washington as president in 1797, completed a seemingly impossible task during his four years in office. He shaped the ill-defined presidency and assured its stability for years to come, even without the unifying presence of Washington to show the way.

“John Adams was an experienced diplomat and a thoughtful constitutional thinker. He was also irascible, stubborn, quixotic, and certain that he knew best most of the time. He proved the right man for the moment,” Chervinsky writes.

And what a trying moment it was. Adams’ Federalist Party and the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson (not to be confused with the Republican Party founded in 1854) despised one another. Moreover, the newspapers of the day were blindly partisan and routinely attacked the opposition, with or without a factual basis for doing so.

Exacerbating the problem, the nascent electoral system in effect in 1796, when Adams was elected, resulted in Jefferson’s selection as Adams’ vice president, guaranteeing bad blood within the administration. (Jefferson later succeeded Adams as president following the disputed 1800 election, which was decided by the House of Representatives on the 36th ballot.)

In one sense, Adams was ill-prepared for the job. Despite his many prior accomplishments, Adams, who had served as Washington’s vice president, assumed the presidency with no executive experience. While Washington was in office he never confided in Adams, did not consult him and excluded him from Cabinet meetings. Effectively, then, Adams came into office as a managerial rookie.

Adams had more to contend with than personal inexperience and Republican hostility. The Cabinet that he inherited from Washington was anything but loyal to the new president. Some of its members went behind his back to seek political advice from, and conspire with, the likes of Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who was at odds with Adams.

Many members of Adams’ own party, including Hamilton, tried to usurp his authority, dictate his decisions and eliminate his jurisdiction over foreign policy. At various times, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and Secretary of War James McHenry clearly were insubordinate, and they were not alone. 

So when the prospect of all-out war with France loomed, and partisan mob violence broke out in the streets of Philadelphia, the nation’s capital at the time, Adams’ political and diplomatic skills were sorely tested.

While much of the nation, including leading Federalists, clamored for war, it was Adams who kept a cool head and managed to avert a full-blown military confrontation by relying on diplomacy, even as Hamilton pushed for war in a bid for military glory. In fact, Hamilton emerges from these pages as such a vain, power-hungry schemer that it’s hard to understand the Broadway treatment he received a few years ago.

Adams effectively forced his secretary of war to resign and fired his secretary of state when their disloyalty became too much for him to bear. Initially, it was unclear if the president had the power to unilaterally dismiss a Cabinet member without Senate approval — until Adams did just that. 

With faith in his own judgment, Adams used the president’s pardon power to free repentant participants in an armed tax revolt. He successfully resubmitted to the Senate a peace treaty with France after the Senate initially rejected it. And he stood firm when fellow Federalists tried to block his selection of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall’s appointment “was one of Adams’ longest lasting contributions to the nation,” Chervinsky writes.

Adams was no more infallible than the rest of us, of course. His grudging support for the now-infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 is a case in point. The Alien Acts penalized immigrants, while the Sedition Act effectively made it a crime to criticize the government. Adams signed the bills into law, but Chervinsky notes that he did not propose them or lobby for them and he expressed “deep ambivalence” about the Sedition Act.

Chervinsky persuasively argues that Adams was anything but vengeful, petty, egomaniacal, and untrustworthy, as Hamilton, Jefferson and other contemporary critics claimed. And she laments the fact that most books about Adams have given his presidency “short shrift,” unfairly treating it as the low point of his career.

As president, Adams “refused to meddle in Congress, he rejected Federalist schemes, he steadfastly adhered to the text of the Constitution, and he walked away after losing with no fuss,” the author writes. “These invaluable contributions ensured the survival of the presidency.”

Review: "The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright"

By Paul Carrier

Relatively few people, even here in New England, have ever heard of Esther Wheelwright, who was born in Wells, Massachusetts (present-day Maine) in 1696. Yet she lived a remarkable, almost unbelievable life until her death, at 84, in 1780. In fact, Wheelwright’s life was so unusual it might be said she had three lives rather than one, as scholar Ann M. Little explains in her 2016 book: The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright.

Born into a staunchly religious Puritan family, Wheelwright lived with her parents and siblings, as well as the family’s servants and slaves, for seven years until August 1703, when 39 Wells residents were killed or kidnapped during a French and Indian raid. The captives, including Wheelwright, were marched north to a Wabanaki village at Norridgewock, in what is now Maine. There, she was adopted by an Indigenous family and raised as a Catholic.

Wheelwright’s third life began to take form in 1708, when she moved still farther north, to Québec, where she lived briefly in the Chateau St. Louis, the governor’s palace. The following year, she was enrolled in a convent school run by the Ursuline nuns, eventually joining that teaching order. She rose to the position of mother superior of the Ursulines of Québec in 1760, after Québec fell to the British during the French and Indian War.

Little, a professor at Colorado State University, does a valiant job of detailing and analyzing Wheelwright’s life. But the task must have been daunting. As Little makes clear, the historical record is spotty.

No one knows, to cite one example, precisely where Wheelwright was when she was first taken captive in Wells in 1703. It’s assumed she was not in the family home at the time, because she was the only member of her immediate family to be seized by the raiding party.

Similarly, while Little makes it clear that much is known about how the Wabanaki of Norridgewock lived in that time period, and informed assumptions can be made about how Wheelwright was treated there, available records shed no light on precisely who adopted her in Norridgewock or how she reacted to the dramatic change in her circumstances. Wheelwright's relocation to Québec in 1708 leaves us with a whole new set of unanswerable questions. Why did she go there? Did she do so willingly?

The author blends exhaustive research with keen insight and a solid grasp of the available facts, but she cannot craft biographical details out of whole cloth, nor does she try to do so. Inevitably the reader learns almost as much about Wells, Norridgewock and Québec as about Wheelwright herself.

Still, that does not diminish Little’s accomplishment, which highlights the unusual prominence and power of the adult Wheelwright in the male-dominated world of the 18th century.

When the British conquered Québec in 1759, they converted sections of the Ursuline monastery into a military hospital and a barracks. The following year, the Ursulines elected Wheelwright, by then 64 years old, mother superior. She would serve three terms in the role, followed by two as the assistant superior.

Wheelwright led or helped lead the Ursulines during their most difficult years, which witnessed the military occupation that immediately followed the conquest of Québec and the uncertainty that plagued French Canadians until the British Parliament finally passed a law in 1774 declaring Catholicism legal in British-ruled Québec.

Little notes that Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant-Jésus, the name Wheelwright took as a nun, “was still considered a foreigner” and an “arrogant autocrat” by some Ursulines during her years at the helm. To her critics, she apparently remained a New England-born Wabanaki adoptee, despite her many years as a French-speaking Ursuline. Yet when her third term as mother superior ended in 1772, Little writes, the monastery had “more students, more novices, and more money” than the nuns could have hoped for “in the dark hours of 1759 and 1760.” 

Wheelwright’s personal story, which made her “remarkable in her lifetime,” probably is responsible for dooming her to obscurity in our time, Little writes. She is “too English or American” for French Canadians, and “too foreign and too Catholic” for Americans. She remains, to this day, the only foreign-born mother superior of the Ursulines in Québec.

Review: "The Revolutionary," Stacy Schiff

By Paul Carrier 

If someone asked you to identify the most important Founding Fathers, you might single out Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison. Or maybe George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.

But what of Samuel Adams?

A gifted propagandist and agitator, Adams is far more than the namesake of a Boston-based brewery. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff makes that clear in The Revolutionary, her thoroughly researched 2022 biography of the tireless and crafty Massachusetts firebrand whom Jefferson described as “truly the man of the Revolution” and cousin John Adams dubbed “the most sagacious politician” of his time.

The Revolutionary methodically documents Adams’ repeated manipulation of tumultuous events to shape public opinion, in Massachusetts and beyond. She offers up fascinating asides as well.

For example, there is the recurring tension between the puritanical Adams and the flamboyant John Hancock. And the fact that Adams’ allies temporarily abandoned Boston's chief provocateur the year after the Boston Massacre, once tempers cooled. The prodigals eventually rejoined Adams’ camp when discontent with the British intensified yet again, in no small part due to the often secretive but invariably successful machinations of Adams, the “indomitable mastermind.”

Schiff reminds readers that the Revolution began “long before Lexington and Concord,” in the hearts and minds of Americans, “where one tactical genius in particular had worked miracles, unanimity congealing around him.”

Review: "Al Capp," Michael Schumacher & Denis Kitchen

By Paul Carrier

For more than four decades, beginning in 1934, Al Capp was one of the most successful comic-strip artists in America as the creator of Li’l Abner; at its peak, the cartoon ran in close to 1,000 newspapers. Yet Capp, his talent and popularity notwithstanding, was a troubled man.

Irascible, judgmental and sometimes mean-spirited, he was a highly visible and vocal satirist who cheated on his wife, was accused of sexually assaulting young women and grew intolerant of leftist politics once he abandoned his own liberal views.

Published in 2013, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary is the first major biography of the legendary cartoonist who transported generations of eager readers to Li'l Abner's hometown of Dogpatch, a fictional backwater somewhere in the hillbilly country of rural Kentucky.

Review: "Henry David Thoreau: A Life," Laura Dassow Walls

By Paul Carrier

An English professor at the University of Notre Dame, Laura Dassow Walls has written or edited several books on Henry David Thoreau; his mentor (of sorts) and lifelong friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson; and their shared transcendentalism.

Her works include Henry David Thoreau: A Life, a comprehensive biography published in 2017 that does not focus on any one aspect of Thoreau's life or character but rather on the whole man.

Walls praises other Thoreau biographers, but she writes that “the Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one.”

Review: "Frederick Douglass," David W. Blight

By Paul Carrier

Popular accounts of the struggle to end slavery in America typically highlight the work of white politicians and activists, notably President Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, and other radical Republicans in Congress. John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Beecher Stowe also come to mind.

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became known for his stellar writing and oratorical skills, is mentioned as well, of course, but often as someone who seemed to labor in the shadow of more notable and important reformers.

Historian David W. Blight moves Douglass to center stage, where he belonged on along, in Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a meticulous biography which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for history. Before, during and after the Civil War, Douglass was an eloquent and mesmerizing champion of racial and gender equality who had the star power to make himself widely heard by using “his only real weapons,” his pen and his voice.

Douglass was “the most photographed American of the nineteenth century,” Blight writes, and he may have been, with Mark Twain, “the most widely traveled American public figure of his century.” By the 1890s Douglass had few rivals in the “golden age” of oratory. In fact, more Americans probably heard him speak than any other public figure of his era. Complex and brilliant, he was radical and independent-minded, yet he routinely used biblical references to buttress his arguments.

Born Frederick Bailey in Talbot County, Md., the son of an enslaved mother and, in all probability, a white father, Douglass witnessed or learned about “at least seven brutal whippings or murders” by the time he was eight years old, Blight writes. He suffered cruelty and brutality firsthand as he grew older, first as a slave and later as a public speaker who became all too familiar with mob violence.

Douglass learned the alphabet as a boy from the sister-in-law of his owner at the time. Without access to a proper education, he essentially taught himself to read and write. Douglass escaped to New York in 1838, where he married Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore, before the couple moved on to New Bedford and Lynn, in Massachusetts; Rochester, N.Y.; and Washington, D.C.

As a young man, Douglass came to see slavery not only as brutal and morally indefensible, but also as a haven for hypocritical slave owners and clergymen who portrayed themselves as devout Christians doing God’s work by exposing Africans and their American-born descendants to a hideously perverted conception of Christianity.

As soon as the charismatic Douglass joined the anti-slavery lecture circuit in the early 1840s he captivated (and antagonized) audiences through a combination of his electrifying stage presence and remarkable fluency as a speaker. He provided a unique perspective unavailable to any white abolitionist, that of a fugitive who had personally experienced the horrors of slavery.

Far from being a secondary figure in the struggle for abolition, Douglass was one of the major public speakers affiliated with Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, which found itself at odds with competing abolitionists who adopted different tactics and philosophies. Douglass initially held firm to Garrison’s principles, at least publicly, but over time his independent spirit, ambition, and linguistic skill propelled him to chart his own course.

Douglass traveled to Great Britain and Ireland during the 1840s, lecturing to massive crowds and boosting his status as a celebrated speaker. While there, supporters purchased his freedom from his owner in Maryland. Returning to America, he moved his family from Massachusetts to Rochester, N.Y., where he founded and published an abolitionist newspaper and eventually found himself at odds with Garrison and his supporters, triggering a bitter feud between the warring abolitionist camps.

The author of three autobiographies, Douglass was as skilled with a pen as he was on the stump. He wrote a novella in 1853 that fictionalized a successful 1841 revolt aboard the slave-trading ship Creole. Blight writes that this was “a logical progression” for this man of letters, who already had tackled oratory, autobiography and  journalism.

By the time the Civil War broke out, Douglass longed to see the complete annihilation of the Southern way of life, arguing that even Southern whites who did not own slaves were tools of the Confederacy’s amoral gentry. He insisted from the outset that the primary goal of the war should be emancipation, although he also supported the preservation of the Union. Blight puts his subject's sarcasm and barbed wit on full display. Following South Carolina’s secession, for example, Douglass mused that the Palmetto State preferred to be “a large piece of nothing,” rather than “a small piece of something.”

Over his long life, Douglass championed the recruitment of African-American soldiers, full citizenship for blacks and continued federal intervention to protect the lives and voting rights of African Americans in the South after the war. He vigorously condemned the Democratic Party as racist and argued that white supremacy remained the guiding principle of the post-war South. During the Gilded Age, Blight notes, Douglass seemed to view white supremacy as a “soul-killing hydra worse than slavery itself.”

At more than 750 pages, Frederick Douglass probes Douglass’ psyche; evolution as a thinker, orator and writer; political growth; and the many relationships, professional and personal, that helped shape his long and eventful life.

Douglass’ home life was a tangle. He probably had a long-term romantic relationship with a German woman living in the United States while Douglass was still married to his first wife, Anna, a freeborn woman from Maryland. As adults, his sons had a hard time supporting their families, and often were at odds with their sister Rosetta and her husband. Following Anna’s death, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a well-educated white activist almost 20 years his junior, without giving advance notice to friends or family.

His prominence notwithstanding, Douglass had his flaws, and not just in terms of marital fidelity. He could be naive and unrealistic, sometimes failing to fully understand the nuances of politics and warfare. Ironically, this impassioned foe of bigotry described Irish immigrants, Native Americans and Catholics in derogatory terms. When Douglass served as the recorder of deeds in Washington for a time after the war, nepotism was so rampant in his office that it became what Blight calls “a Douglass-family cash cow.”

Still, there is no denying Douglass’ standing as a deservedly beloved figure and a true hero of American history. Frederick Douglass is an exhaustive, compelling biography that transforms its subject from a marble icon into a majestically inspiring human being, capturing his inexhaustible passion, powerful intellect and innate dignity. As Abraham Lincoln told Douglass during a White House reception following Lincoln’s second inauguration: “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”

Review: "N.C. Wyeth: A Biography," by David Michaelis

By Paul Carrier

He may be less celebrated in our time than son Andrew and grandson Jamie. But Newell Convers Wyeth was arguably the most famous and admired illustrator of the 20th century, thanks to works that appeared in books, magazines, advertisements and other venues.

Reproductions of N.C. Wyeth's paintings and illustrations are readily available in book form, but to the best of my knowledge, there's only one full-length biography of the artist. For that reason, and because of author David Michaelis’ exhaustive research, his nuanced 1998 examination of Wyeth’s life remains compelling and authoritative two decades after its publication.

N.C. Wyeth: A Biography clocks in at 430 pages, not counting a genealogy of Wyeth’s paternal and maternal lines, more than 70 pages of notes, a 19-page bibliography and six pages of acknowledgements. But Michaelis’ thoroughness pays off with a wealth of detail about both the chronology of Wyeth’s life and his state of mind along the way.

Raised in Needham, Mass., Wyeth was the oldest of four sons born to Newell Wyeth and Henrietta (Hattie) Zirngiebel. His mother encouraged his artistic pursuits as a boy, and Wyeth had an especially close relationship with her.

That changed for a time when the self-absorbed and possibly mentally ill Hattie, a suffocating force in the lives of her four sons, grew resentful of Wyeth’s decision to marry. But Wyeth’s devotion to his mother resurfaced soon enough. Those ties, coupled with an overpowering nostalgia for the Needham of his youth, remained obsessive focal points of his life.

One of the strengths of N.C. Wyeth is the generous use of artwork and family photos to complement the text. Another is Michaelis’ success in chronicling the complexity of his subject’s ever-evolving relationships with those closest to him, including his parents; Carolyn Bockius, whom Wyeth eventually married; and Howard Pyle, the famed illustrator who accepted Wyeth as a student at his Delaware-based school of art.

Michaelis also devotes considerable attention to the central conflict in Wyeth’s professional life: his preoccupation with elevating his work from what he viewed as mere illustration to the higher plane of fine art.

“The more successful he became as an illustrator, the more he discriminated between pictures painted to illustrate texts and pictures painted for exhibition,” Michaelis writes. “The more popular N.C. Wyeth became, the less he seemed to count as a real artist.”

Michaelis approaches his subject with the same astute powers of observation and analysis that the biographer displayed, years later, in Schulz and Peanuts, his 2007 biography of the legendary cartoonist who created one of the most beloved comic strips of all time.

The author has plenty to work with. Wyeth was bighearted bur secretive, outgoing but conflicted, an ambitious artist who sold himself short. Not only was the often-depressed (and never treated) Wyeth alternately proud of his work and disgusted by it, but he felt intellectually superior to his wife, conflicted about Pyle, and suspicious of anything that smacked of change. He was, for many years, perennially wedded to an idealized vision of Needham as something akin to paradise.

The ultimate homebody, Wyeth was clannish and devoted to his family. Michaelis gives the Wyeths’ brood of children their due. All five of them — sons Andrew and Nat and daughters Henriette, Ann and Carolyn — were talented, fascinating people in their own right.

Andrew's star eventually shone brighter than those of his siblings, of course. In fact, N.C. lived to see the son eclipse the father. Over time, N.C. came to be viewed more and more as the father of Andrew, rather than as the dean of American illustration.

Still, N.C. took great pride in his son’s success and growing reputation, which was well-established by the time N.C. and his very young grandson died in 1945, when an oncoming train plowed into N.C.’s car at a railroad crossing in Pennsylvania. The artist was 62 years old.

Shortly before N.C.’s death, Andrew, who worshipped his father, tried to bolster N.C.’s appreciation of his own legacy. “I told him that he didn’t realize what he had done," Michaelis quotes Andrew as saying. "He’d reached a pinnacle in illustration that would live forever. And I hoped that he would not look down on it.” N.C. was moved, but Michaelis notes that this great talent, so long at war with himself, “did not — could not — agree.”

Review: "Friends Divided," Gordon S. Wood

By Paul Carrier

It’s widely known among students of the American Revolution and its aftermath that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were dear friends who later had a lengthy falling out, only to be reunited after both men had served as president.

It’s that eventual rapprochement that warms the hearts of history buffs. But what may be more incongruous is that such dramatically different men became close to begin with, having very little in common beyond their shared commitment to American independence.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood makes clear in Friends Divided, a dual biography, Adams and Jefferson hailed from different socio-economic backgrounds and disparate colonies. They had dissimilar religious beliefs and were unalike in their political philosophies. Their personalities and temperaments almost were polar opposites. Even after the two men rekindled their friendship, Wood writes, they “remained divided in almost every fundamental way.”

Jefferson was a Virginia aristocrat; Adams, a Massachusetts lawyer who was by no means a member of that colony’s upper crust. Virginia was a rural colony in which plantations held sway. Massachusetts was doted with cities, towns and villages, giving it a more urban feel. More importantly, 40 percent of Virginia’s 340,000 residents in 1760 were slaves, compared to fewer than 2 percent of the 280,000 people living in Massachusetts at that time. Jefferson owned many slaves; Adams, none.

Physically removed from the hotbed of rebellion that was New England, Jefferson conceived of his enemies before 1776 as being “three thousand miles away,” in Britain. With Tories representing a much larger percentage of the population in Massachusetts than in Virginia, Wood writes, Adams quickly came to realize that his enemies “were his former friends and neighbors.” Jefferson’s opposition to British rule was intellectual and ideological; not, as it was for Adams, “tangible” and “personal.”

Part of what Wood accomplishes in Friends Divided, simply by laying out the facts of life in post-revolution America, is to further debunk the fraudulent notion that the founders were the infallible creators of a perfect political system that was carved in stone from the outset, like the tablets handed down to Moses. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States, in the late 1700s, was awash in conflicting viewpoints and evolving political practices. To some extent, that evolution continued in the early 19th century as well. Early American democracy developed in fits and starts, through trial and error.

The Articles of Confederation, which governed the country before the adoption of the Constitution, proved to be an embarrassing failure. State constitutions created in 1776 came under attack within a few years for their deficiencies. Lengthy political debates raged for years, at both the state and national levels, over how best to structure governments and whether the birth of political parties, which the founders had not anticipated, was an asset or a liability.

Should legislatures be unicameral or bicameral? Should governors be strong or weak? If granted veto power, should the veto be absolute, meaning a legislature could not override it? Should both branches of a bicameral legislature represent all of the people, or should the Senate be set aside for society’s elites, as a counterweight to the House of Representatives? Was George Washington, as the first president elected under the Constitution, a king by a different name, as many Americans at the time would have preferred?

Jefferson and Adams jumped into this quagmire, sometimes by proposing ideas that we would view as heretical today. Adams supported lengthy, and possibly lifetime, terms of office for presidents and senators. He even broached the idea of making such offices hereditary. For his part, Jefferson believed all three branches of the federal government -- not just the Supreme Court -- had the power to decide the constitutionality of laws. And Jefferson argued that the First Amendment only prohibited Congress from restricting freedom of the press, leaving the states free to do so.

Despite their radically different personalities, the curmudgeonly, argumentative Adams and the reserved, gracious Jefferson hit it off during the Second Continental Congress. Jefferson was “so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive,” Adams said, “that he soon seized upon my heart.” Adams was “our Colossus” in Congress, Jefferson later said, a force of nature charged “with a power, both of thought and of expression, which moved us from our seats.”

The mutual affection that Adams and Jefferson developed during the struggle for independence intensified in the 1780s, when both men found themselves in Europe. But that rapport began to shatter in the 1790s as party divisions developed. It grew still worse even before Adams became president in 1797, thanks in large part to the former friends’ radically different views on the French Revolution.

Jefferson supported that revolution from the outset, and continued to do so during and after the Reign of Terror. He saw France as America’s sister republic, and feared that the collapse of the French Revolution would undermine support for democratic principles in America as well. Adams, who was as much of an Anglophile as Jefferson was a Francophile, was appalled by the violence in France and doubted whether the French — or the American people, for that matter — were virtuous enough to truly govern themselves.

Jefferson’s egalitarianism and his belief in American exceptionalism ran up against Adams’ skeptical view of self-government and his acceptance of aristocracy and hierarchy. Even their views of human nature differed, with Jefferson insisting that people tend to act responsibly if left to their own devices and Adams arguing that human vices almost always win out over reason and conscience. Jefferson was naive but inspiring, “the sage of Monticello,” courteous and optimistic. Adams was a grumpy realist, a contrarian who spoke bluntly and often displayed a biting, even self-deprecating, sense of humor.

Their split widened when Jefferson’s election as president in 1800 denied Adams a second term. To make matters worse, Jefferson and Adams’ wife, Abigail, who had once been close friends, had a falling out during an exchange of letters. Urged on by mutual friend and fellow Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, Adams and Jefferson inched toward reconciliation after Jefferson left office. Then, two young Virginia brothers, John and Edward Coles, who were friends of Jefferson, visited Adams in Massachusetts and told him they had often heard Jefferson say complimentary things about him.

No stranger to bursts of emotion, Adams exclaimed: “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.” Rush continued to poke and prod until, on Jan. 1, 1812, Adams finally broke the ice with what Wood calls “a humorous and affable letter” to Jefferson. Wood highlights the written exchanges that followed until one final event united two of the greatest founding fathers for eternity. On July 4, 1826, on the 5oth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Adams and Jefferson died within hours of one another.