Toward a Divided Union

Abstract

Taken together, the two books under review here remind us that the central drama of our national history, the Civil War, exploded from conflicting ideological visions which were framed not only by grand and perhaps irrepressible historical forces, but also by living men and women. While neither of these volumes overtly attempts to revive the deservedly moribund man school of historical interpretation, the authors, both established experts on the American middle period, suggest that people often shape events every bit as much as events shape people. Upon first impression, these two volumes appear to have little in common. Niven's biography of John C. Calhoun, the first such effort to appear in more than a quarter century, traces the career of the Old South's foremost political strategist and political thinker, while Johannsen's essays focus on the American West, that broad prairie of possibilities, and on how Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, two extraordinary but very different men, articulated visions of the West and its future that shaped both the political and personal aspirations of most white northerners during the late antebellum era. Yet upon further reflection, a connection between the two works emerges; both books study men who pondered not only the future of their respective regions but also the fate of the Union they each loved in their own very different way. When juxtaposed, these studies, despite their individual limitations, tell us a great deal about the parameters of sectional conflict in antebellum America. John Niven, now a retired professor of history at the Claremont Graduate School and an accomplished biographer, has written a brisk yet comprehensive biography of John C. Calhoun for Louisiana State University Press's impressive Southern Biography series. Niven's narrative moves at a breathtak-