Robert W. Merry’s “Decade of Disunion” traces the path to civil war through two states

Robert W. Merry, a veteran journalist and former editor of Congressional Quarterly and American Conservative, has written books on the Mexican-American War, U.S. foreign policy, and President William McKinley. (Merry’s daughter Stephanie is a books editor at The Washington Post. She was not involved in this review.) His latest work, “Decade of Disunion,” covers one of the most traveled-about topics in American history – the outbreak of the Civil War. Yet Merry has found a novel approach, promising to focus on Massachusetts and South Carolina, two states that played major roles in nearly every phase of America’s road to collapse. He leaves any parallels between past and present largely implicit, but it is clear that his thoughts on the Union’s current crisis have shaped his portrayal of the period before the earlier crisis.

The two states were on a collision course for a long time. South Carolina plantation owners demanded stronger protections for black slavery until they split the Democratic Party and tipped the 1860 election to Abraham Lincoln, after which the state attempted to secede from the Union. Massachusetts gave refuge to refugees from southern slavery and was a founding member of the Republican Party, the first anti-slavery coalition in world history. The climax came in 1856, when South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to a pulp in the Senate – a gruesome harbinger of even greater violence to come.

This framework sheds new and interesting light on a story usually told on a national or even continental scale. A master of the two-page portrait, Merry shows how the clashes between politicians within the states were often as fierce as the larger struggle between North and South, and he gives a new introduction to the characters at the heart of the story, some well-known and some less so. “His mind was strongly focused on grand conclusions, without regard for nuance or subtlety,” he writes of Robert Barnwell Rhett, a South Carolinian secessionist, “and once he had reached a conclusion, it could be immediately guarded against any pesky self-doubt or counterargument.” There is no shortage of Rhetts walking the halls of Congress today.

It is just unfortunate that the book does not stick more closely to this two-state approach. Too much of it is devoted to rehashing the general political history of the period through a slow, somber march through the years – something many others have done before it. Decade of Disunion focuses intensely on high politics and barely escapes the narrow confines of Washington and the obligatory recitation of one speech after another. Do we need to know the names of the every Vice-presidential candidate on every Party list, large and small? Especially when the subtitle of the book gives us little more than a cursory sketch of the economic, social and cultural history of the two states.

While Merry makes clear that slavery caused the conflict, he largely avoids talking about bondage itself. The practice is described early on as “long a baleful dilemma smoldering over the flames of politics”—a remarkably abstract way of putting it. When we hear in passing of “the plight of American blacks trapped in bondage, with all the pain, agony, and inhumanity of that experience,” Merry sums up “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Sumner considered his wounds from the attack on Brooks nothing “compared to that tale of suffering that continually reaches us from the house of bondage!” That story may be familiar to readers, but so are the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which take up 10 pages despite having nothing to do with Massachusetts or South Carolina.

For all his summing up of the struggles of the 1850s, Merry sometimes doesn’t seem to fully understand what all the fuss was about. He blames it on “burgeoning emotionalism on both sides,” as if the loss of decency was the cause of the crisis rather than a symptom. That’s not a convincing explanation for the conflict of the 1850s – or, for that matter, our own.

Merry recently argued in the American Conservative that another civil war may indeed be imminent. “History shows that when the central issues of the day are viewed in moral terms, political decision-making becomes extremely difficult, sometimes impossible,” he warned. That was the mistake the abolitionists made, and it is now being repeated by “the nation’s knowledge sector elites” who are “embracing an ethos of globalism,” as seen in the “morally based crusade for transgender rights.” The plight of marginalized people is apparently still no cause for outrage.

Yet the very symmetry Merry highlights in the 1850s—when radicals in South Carolina and Massachusetts rejected compromise and opted for secession or even war—is missing today. Many Republicans are using violent rhetoric and denying the legitimacy of elections, while Democrats are refusing to use hard-line measures like packing the courts and even valiantly helping to save the Republican speaker of the House from being ousted by fellow extremists in his own party. There is no single issue dividing the nation. We have nothing as clear as the Mason-Dixon Line that could possibly divide us. Still, it may be again, as Lincoln predicted in 1858, that “a crisis” must be “reached and passed” before the country can return to anything resembling peace.

Richard Kreitner writes a book about American Jews, slavery and the Civil War.

How Massachusetts and South Carolina led the Civil War 1849-1861

Simon & Schuster. 514 pages. $35