Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers. By Ken S. Mueller.

Abstract

Senator Benton and the People: Master Race Democracy on the Early American Frontiers . Early American Places Series. By Ken S. Mueller. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014. xi + 320 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, cloth; $29.95, paper.) Although one of nineteenth-century America’s preeminent political figures, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton has attracted no major biographies or monographs since the 1950s. The political career of Benton, a pillar of the Democratic Party for decades and westward expansion’s most bombastic visionary, spanned the era from the War of 1812 to the sectional crisis of the 1850s. For much of the twentieth century, the ardent Jacksonian was lauded by historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Nisbet Chambers, and John F. Kennedy, as a tribune for the common settler and, late in his career, a courageous opponent of the extreme proslavery and sectionalist elements growing in Washington, DC, and Missouri, despite his own slaveholding background. … pasleyj{at}missouri.edu