America Aflame

In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first

major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson''s

Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war

as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America''s greatest

failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical

religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged

through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to

be fought to the death.

The price of that failure was horrific,

but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the

United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in

the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land

of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered

squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by

science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind.

Goldfield''s panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of

Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as

HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are

lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl

Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander

Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy.

America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.