Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

An Ecstatic America

Brenda Wineapple's new book, "Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848 -- 1877" (2013) offers an unusual, passionate portrayal of the United States from the years following the end of the War with Mexico through the Civil War, and to the conclusion of Reconstruction in 1877. Wineapple writes with literary flair, with an emphasis on both characters, familiar and unfamiliar, and on the telling incident or detail, The author or editor of many books primarily on Nineteenth Century American literature, Wineapple is the Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College. She also teaches in the MFA programs at the New School University and Columbia University.

How, in Wineapple's view, was the United States an "ecstatic" nation in the decades surrounding the Civil War? Her answer is complex and focus on the brashness, self-confidence and yet inwardness of Americans in the mid-19th Century. Wineapple begins her answer with Ralph Waldo Emerson's description of the United States as a "country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations" before qualifying Emerson's answer in her own voice. "[T]he present was and the future would also be a time of delirium, failure, greed, violence, and refusal; refusal to listen and to find -- or create -- that hard common ground of compromise; refusal to bend, so great was the fear of breaking; refusal to change and refusal to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. ...In short, American was an ecstatic nation; smitten with itself and prosperity and invention and in love with the land from which it drew its riches -- a land grand and fertile, extending from one sea to another and to which its citizens felt entitled. Yet there was a problem -- a hitch, a blot, a stain. The stain was slavery."

Again, Wineapple writes: "For in the roiling middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans looked within, not without, there was an unassailable intensity and imagination and exuberance, inspirited and nutty and frequently cruel or brutal. There was also a seemingly insatiable and almost frenetic quest for freedom, expressed in several competing ways, for the possession of things, of land, and -- alas-- of persons. And in many instances there was a passion, sometimes self-righteous, sometimes self-abnegating, for doing good, even if that good included, for its sake and in its name, acts of murder."

Besides the bravura of America, Wineapple focuses on the conflict between compromise and principle. The discussion frequently moves into the realm of secularism -- the use of human reason and laws to explain and justify courses of conduct and the resort to a "higher law", usually religious, to which human institutions must respond. The tension between compromise and principle and the claimed resort to "higher law" have large ramifications througout the study. Wineapple also explores how the American vision of freedom and opportunity all too often narrowed into a pursuit of financial success and, still more tragically, brushed aside the aspirations of some Americans, particularly in the case of slavery.

Although lengthy at nearly 600 pages of text, the book is short for the period it considers. The study consists of three large parts, the first dealing with the pre-Civil War years 1848 -- 1861, the second dealing with the Civil War itself, 1861 -- 1865, and the concluding section with Reconstruction, 1865 -- 1877. Each of these time periods has been the subject of many extended studies. Wineapple's study thus offers a broad overview which tries to find continuities and trends in this pivotal 30 year period. The study is suggestive rather than thorough and it flows quickly. Wineapple's approach tends to rely more on literature than would be the case in most historical studies. She relies and discusses the works of famous writers, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman as well as lesser-known authors, such as the Southern poet, Henry Timrod. She pays a great deal of attention as well to photography as it developed during this period, to newspapers, and to the showman P.T. Barnum.

The book frequently reads like a series of moving biographies. The narrative will reach a person that Wineapple considers worth pursuing, and she will discuss that person at length, sometimes at different points in the study. She does so throughout with the novelist's eye for details that illuminate character. Some of her characters, of course, are the key figures of the era: Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson Davis. Others are less well known. For example Wineapple discusses the abolitionist and children's book author Lydia Martin Child, (the author of the song "over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go") the feminist and free love advocate Victoria Claffin Woodhull, and the explorer and scientist Clarence King. Wineapple also focuses on details that frequently receive little attention in histories, such as the tragic Pemberton Mill Collapse in 1860, resulting in hundreds of deaths to millworkers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The result is a book that both takes a broad perspective and makes large claims and also uses stories and details of people to create an intimate account.

The book is a collage and portrayal of the United States, its conflicted goals, and the way the nation achieved or failed to achieve these goals. Overall, the section of the book dealing with the Civil War is the least effective as Wineapple focuses more on details than on the history of the conflict. The approach works better for the pre-Civil War years and, for the most part for Reconstruction. Portions of the history are perhaps treated too quickly.

Wineapple has written a thoughtful provocative book on the United States as an "ecstatic nation". The book will encourage its readers to reflect upon American history and upon the conflicts and tensions from the Civil War era that remain with Americans today.

Robin Friedman