Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union, and: Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War, and: William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

As the culmination of decades of struggle over slavery and state sovereignty, the secession crisis that erupted into war in 1861 continues to intrigue Americans, professional scholars and general readers alike. If secession constituted a crisis for individuals as well as polities—as Stephen Berry has observed, it “was a mosaic of a million American unbecomings, each with its own peculiar dynamics”—then biography is an excellent way to understand the rending of the Union.¹ John Belohlavek, John Myers, and Eric Walther offer new biographies of three leading Americans—Caleb Cushing, Henry Wilson, and William Lowndes Yancey, respectively—focused, according to their titles, on these political figures’ relationships to the nation’s breakup.

All three books provide enormous amounts of information about their subjects, each an incredible man—Cushing, the scholarly Renaissance man, diplomat, and ambitious politician; Wilson, the shoemaker and committed enemy of the “Slave Power”; and Yancey, perhaps the preeminent southern fire-eater—who deserves a modern, full-length biography. Each book goes beyond its particular subject in an effort to tell us about the world of antebellum politics they shared.

Born Jeremiah Jones Colbath into a New Hampshire farm family in 1812, Henry Wilson experienced a rags-to-riches life. Apprenticed to a farmer at ten, he later walked over one hundred miles to Natick, Massachusetts, to learn the craft of making shoes. From these humble origins, he became a successful shoemaker, employing dozens of workers, and then entered politics to support temperance and especially the antislavery cause. He pursued his political passion as a leader of the Conscience Whigs, Free Soilers, Know Nothings and, ultimately, the Republicans.

The book is well researched, but the paucity of Wilson’s personal papers prevents Myers from telling much about his family life, religious beliefs, or other private concerns. There is virtually nothing about Wilson’s wife or son, for instance. Instead Myers focuses almost exclusively on politics, and especially on Wilson’s role as a party leader beginning in the 1840s and as a U.S. senator in the 1850s. Also, although Wilson lived until 1875, Myers deals only with Wilson’s antebellum life; the book ends with Fort Sumter and a single paragraph on Wilson’s post-April 1861 career, including his service as Ulysses Grant’s vice president. Myers focuses, as the title suggests, on Wilson’s role in the sectional crisis leading to the Civil War.

As Myers acknowledges at the outset, this work seeks to highlight Wilson’s contributions to political antislavery while rehabilitating a reputation damaged by seeming partisan disloyalty. The book will most appeal to those interested in antislavery politics in antebellum Massachusetts and in Congress in the decade immediately before the war. It devotes far more attention to these matters than do the most recent Wilson biographies, which date from the early 1970s.² At its best, this study does a good job of reviewing the twists and turns of party formation, particularly during the confusion surrounding the simultaneous rise of the Know Nothings and the Republicans in the 1850s. Wilson associated with both groups, even at the same time, and Myers takes pains to defend him against charges of political insincerity. He argues that his devotion to antislavery stood at the center of all of his political maneuverings. Myers shows, too, how his opposition to the “Slave Power” guided his actions as a senator, including cooperating with Democrat Stephen Douglas over Kansas issues in 1857–1858.

Still, Myers often...