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This is a scholarly look at American politics from roughly 1818 to 1832.

Maybe a bit too scholarly for me. Many parts of the book are very finely argued, and I tended to lose track of what the argument was. It is obvious in places that he also arguing for a different interpretation on events than has been common, but I’m not at all familiar with what he’s arguing against.

Even with my limitations, it was a very interesting read. One of Forbes’ main contentions is that President Monroe had more control of events than he is credited with. Apparently the usual look at the era was that he was nearly sidelined while events like the Missouri Compromise were going on. Here, the contention is that Monroe was aware that if he stepped into the debate, it would polarize the sides to the point where compromise was impossible, so he worked entirely behind the scenes to maneuver events to a stand down on all sides.

Forbes presents early American politics as a tension between ideological conflicts (generally, the role of the Federal government), and sectional ones (largely slavery). This is an unstable situation, as in the long run most political conflicts are going to want to turn regional, but the goal of several canny politicians of the era was to keep non-regional issues in play and force the parties into national, instead of regional, systems. This breaks down later, with the demise of the Missouri Compromise, and the rise of the Republican Party, which is strongly regional.

There is also a lot of look into the thoughts behind what is going on and being said, particularly, of course, various defenses of slavery. South Carolina comes in the for extra-special snowflake award as the bigger planters there generally felt that any change to their society would bring about utter collapse. This leads South Carolina to being in the lead of defenses of slavery, and more importantly (to them), the lead in making sure the federal government does as little as possible. It was felt that letting the government go around building roads, improving waterways, and just, you know, making commerce better for everyone would inevitably cause the kind of changes that they were desperate to avoid.

So, while it often looks like the subject of slavery had disappeared from politics in the 1820s, the argument over “internal improvements” and tariffs that lead to the Nullification Crisis are powered by a fear of change in the state with the highest proportion of black slaves to free whites in the country.

This book was a bit much for me as it juggled more things than I could entirely keep track of, but it is decidedly a well done scholarly look at the subject, and worth reading (along with other works) by anyone who wants a better understanding how the initial Founding Fathers’ idea that slavery would go away on its own failed.