Thomas Fleming: A Disease in the Public Mind

By the time John Brown’s body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made him 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 in the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leaders of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by southerners, “slavocrats,” men like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear—race war.

In the sixty 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.

Thomas Fleming is a distinguished historian and author of more than forty books. A frequent guest on PBS, A&E and the History Channel, Fleming has contributed articles to American Heritage, History Today, and many others.