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A Disease in the Public Mind

A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War

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A Disease in the Public Mind

Written by: Thomas Fleming
Narrated by: William Hughes
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By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats" like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: race war. In the 60 years preceding the outbreak of civil war, Northern and Southern fanatics ramped up the struggle over slavery. By the time they had become intractable enemies, only the tragedy of a bloody civil war could save the Union.

In this riveting and character-driven history, one of America’s most respected historians traces the "disease in the public mind" - distortions of reality that seized large numbers of Americans - in the decades-long run-up to the Civil War.

©2013 Thomas Fleming (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Wars & Conflicts Civil War War Military New Civil War
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What the critics say

"The prolific Fleming, for decades a fixture among American historians, pinpoints public opinion as the proximate origin of the war.… Making a plausible presentation of antebellum attitudes and illusions, Fleming is sure to spark lively discussion about the Civil War." ( Booklist)

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History is white

I had to give up on this book, halfway through and despite its granular exposition of the decades between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Fleming's premise is that the Civil War was caused by New England abolitionists with hatred (a word used in this context over and over again) in their hearts for the South and for slaveholders who, in Fleming's view, were reasonably motivated by their fears of slave uprisings. The enormity of the harm to enslaved black people is almost completely sidelined, as for Fleming, American history is about what happens to white people.

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