Heroes, Villains & Dupes: How the antebellum presidents allowed slavery to drive the country to the Civil War
This is one of those rare Civil War books that is based upon an original concept, and that fresh idea is well developed by the author. Paul Ronan focuses on how effectively or ineffectively our 15 antebellum presidents acted to prevent civil war by trying or not trying to bring slavery to a peaceful end. The book contains a stimulating chronological analysis of each president’s performance based on this single, critical criterion and a lucid graphic reflecting that analysis. Each president shows up in a quadrant reflecting vertically his professed belief that slavery was evil or good and horizontally his actions to perpetuate or ultimately extinguish slavery. Each is represented by a circle whose size designates his impact. The hypocrites’ quadrant reveals Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe as those who professed opposition to slavery but acted to perpetuate it. Ronan represents Jefferson with a huge circle primarily because of his missed opportunity to ban slavery in the entire Louisiana Purchase when Congress gave him carte blanche authority to establish territorial rules for it. His hypocrisy and inaction make Jefferson the primary villain of this work. Not far behind is James K. Polk, who instigated the Mexican War to promote slavery and advanced the concept of justifiable secession. George Washington, John Quincy Adams and, surprisingly, Millard Fillmore are the heroes of this analysis for reasons set forth by the author in his individual analyses of them. As expected, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce are seen as dupes — weak party hacks who promoted slavery to curry favor with their southern Democratic supporters. I’ll leave you to guess where Ronan ranks Andrew Jackson and the others I have not mentioned. In a brief but powerful section on “Slavery as the Cause of the War,” Ronan quotes from the Confederate Constitution, the Crittenden Compromise proposal and Mississippi’s declaration of the reasons for secession to demonstrate the exclusive focus on slavery as the cause for secession and formation of the Confederacy. Two appendices contain a wealth of information supporting several of Ronan’s contentions. One shows the changing composition of the Supreme Court and its pro-slavery conversion resulting from appointments by Democratic presidents. Another contains detailed state-by-state population data for every census from 1790 to 1860 that show, among other things, the number of additional slave state Congressmen that resulted from the Constitution’s “3/5ths clause.” For example, in 1840 that clause deprived free states of 15 Representatives and gave them instead to slave states — a shift of 30 votes among 240 members of the House of Representatives. Whether you agree or disagree with Ronan’s hypotheses and analyses, you will be stimulated by them. This is definitely a thought-provoking book. As a self-published book that apparently was reviewed by only three people other than the author, it is marred by over 60 errors, including scattered misspellings of the names of John Fremont, George McClellan, Millard Fillmore and Kenneth Stampp. If these mistakes were corrected, perhaps in another printing, this would be a great book. Even with these flaws, it is highly recommended for every Civil War reader and library. Reviewer: Edward Bonekemper Book Review Editor Ed Bonekemper, adjunct military history lecturer at Muhlenberg College, is the author of four Civil War books. |
Notes, tables, appendices, bibliography, index, 243 pp., 2010, Xlibris Corp.,