An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean

Abstract

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era . Civil War America Series. By Adam Wesley Dean. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. x + 230 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) It is always tempting as a historian to read the news and imagine identifying the seeds of contemporary events. Sometimes we find the smoking gun, but other times the connections are elusive—more hunch than fact. In An Agrarian Republic , historian Adam Wesley Dean believes the seeds of the contemporary anti-government wise use movement were sown in the formation of the antebellum Republican Party that elevated Abraham Lincoln into the presidency. Dean specifically claims that the same impulses that led Americans to abandon the Whig and American … blynn{at}ksu.edu