One could make the case that Yale professor Joanne Freeman is obsessed with people getting shot. And we should be grateful. Freeman, who has devoted much of her professional writing to the twin subjects of dueling and Alexander Hamilton, has produced one of the best books of the year, and one of the best histories of antebellum America written in many years.
That's a lofty statement for a field in which the competition is both deep and wide. But The Field of Blood presents such a holistic examination of the American character in a seemingly micro-venue—Congress in the 1840s and 1850s—that it forces us to reexamine how we've understood and interpreted the runup to the Civil War. That is a monumental feat in itself. The fact that she manages to tell a heck of a story in the process puts the lie to the oft-asserted (and sometimes correct) claim that academics can't write. This is a great book.
The Field of Blood can be seen as a sort of second volume of Freeman's “Violence in Washington” chronicle. Her Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001), explored how politics in the first years after ratification of the Constitution were dominated by the rituals of the culture of honor. Carrying the story decades further into the early republic in her new book, Freeman notes the continuity with the first volume while—like the country itself—taking a turn toward an ever more violent confrontation over the fate of the union.
Read Full Article »