Increasingly, it seems, Americans are fracturing culturally, economically, politically, and spiritually. Anxiety, discontent, and distrust of our fellow Americans have become the common currency of public discourse. Political speech has shrunk to sound bites and tweets. Our grasp of basic grammar – the architecture of clear expression – has disintegrated. Language once fitted for locker rooms, if even there, sprouts on protest placards and from the mouths of national leaders. Popular culture saturated with coarseness masquerades as creativity. What passes for news on television and online too often trivializes complexity, distorts the truth, inflates personality, and delivers ideological combat instead of penetrating reportage.

As we all know, I think, education in civics and government has foundered over the last half-century. Countless young – and even not so young – Americans no longer know the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives, how a bill becomes law, or understand the way power is shared between Congress and the president. It increasingly seems that, in presidential elections, many Americans of all political stripes feel they are choosing an autocrat who can do what he wants once he takes office, and they react with fury when the balancing machinery of republican government prevents him from doing so. Ignorance guarantees disappointment with the inevitably messy way that compromise politics actually works. And such disappointment with what the Founding Fathers bequeathed us invites the demagoguery – of whatever persuasion — that the Founders rightly feared. This kind of ignorance and corrosive disappointment is not something that America can long afford.

Contempt for fundamental democratic institutions has become commonplace, and support for Congress and the established press has fallen to an all-time and deeply concerning low. Confidence in the ability of seasoned politicians to make the decisions that are necessary for the nation’s welfare has shriveled. We long for examples of constructive, creative, capable government, but don’t find them. Where, we might wonder, as many Americans do, are our Washingtons, our Madisons, our Hamiltons? Where are we to find great conciliators and compromisers like Henry Clay, and moral giants such as Martin Luther King, when we so sorely need them? We might be forgiven for believing that the nation is at one of the most dire points in its history.

While history may not offer much immediate solace in a time of trial, the past can nonetheless illuminate our path through the wilderness of the political moment by reminding us that our ancestors overcame many challenges even more fraught with danger than those we face today. History also encourages us to remember that the seeming giants of the past were not demigods but men as challenged by the crises of their time as we are today. Charles Francis Adams – the great-grandson of John Adams — once said: “We are beginning to forget that the patriots of former days were men like ourselves, acting and acted upon like the present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.” Those words were written in 1871. They are, if anything, even more apt today.

Take James Madison, one of the charter trustees of this college. He was physically unimpressive, decidedly lacking in charisma, and spoke in a whispery, difficult-to-hear voice. Yet he consistently impressed those who worked with him with his “most ingenious” clarity of mind, his powers of persuasion, his willingness to listen to others, and his determination to make the imperfect machine of government work. No other man contributed more to the intellectual bedrock of our government. Brilliant as he was, he suffered several major defeats at the Constitutional Convention: he had proposed that the president be chosen by the legislative branch, that Congress be given the right to override state laws, and that the membership of both houses of Congress be based on population. On each of these he was defeated. Yet he went on, unbowed, to implement the Constitution on the parliamentary battleground of the First Congress.

The First Congress met only months after the ratification of the Constitution, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, from 1789 to 1791. The challenges facing the nation were immense. The United States was a shaky collection of eleven sovereign states – North Carolina and Rhode Island hadn’t yet joined the union yet. (Congress almost dispatched troops to march on Rhode Island, to carry out “regime change” in Providence.) Opponents of the new Constitution – including Hampden-Sydney charter trustee Patrick Henry — were demanding hundreds of amendments. The government had no reliable source of revenue. More than fifty different currencies were in circulation. (Thomas Jefferson had to change money every time he crossed a state line on his journey from Monticello to New York.) There was no permanent capital. Southerners were suspicious of northerners, westerners of easterners, and New Englanders of everyone else. There were well-founded fears that the trans-Appalachian West would break off into another country, or maybe several. The British threatened the fragile new nation from the north, Indian nations from the West, and the Spanish from the South. Quakers were demanding an end to slavery, while southerners threatened secession if government dared to tamper with their “peculiar institution.” Even many members of Congress doubted that the government would survive its birth. It’s worth remembering that when Gorge Washington took the oath of office at his first inauguration, onlookers could see that his hands were shaking. It wasn’t because of age: he feared that he wasn’t up to the task he faced. As Madison, who dominated the first crucial session of the First Congress, put it, “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”

In the teeth of such adversity, the First Congress achieved the most prodigious output of any single Congress in American history. It established the executive departments, the federal court system, the first revenue streams for the national government, approved the first amendments to the Constitution, adopted a program for paying the country’s debts and embraced the principles of capitalism as the underpinning of government financial policy. It also founded the first National Bank, established the national capital on the Potomac River, enacted the first patent and copyright laws, founded the United States Coast Guard, and much more.

How did they achieve all this? It wasn’t with a group hug. They did it largely through contentious debate and pragmatic, occasionally shameless, deal-making. Perhaps the best known compromise – now famous thanks to a certain well-known musical – took place at Thomas Jefferson’s home on Maiden Lane, in the heart of today’s financial district, in New York. There, in June 1790, Madison agreed to supply a certain number of very grudging votes from his friends in Maryland and Virginia in order to enact Alexander Hamilton’s far-reaching financial plan. In return, Hamilton a proto-abolitionist who favored a free-state capital, agreed to trade votes from his supporters in the North for the establishment of the seat of government securely in the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. It was, in essence, the first “backroom deal” in American history.

By today’s unrealistic standards, such swapping of votes at the expense of principle might seem reprehensible. But it required both character and courage on the part of the men involved. And the nation was the better for it.

Most of the members of that First Congress were not so different from the men and women who populate Capitol Hill today. Most were professional politicians, a majority were lawyers, and there was a good deal of chaff along with the human grain. They differed deeply from each other on many issues – slavery, centralized government, financial policy, regional interests, taxation. But every one of them wanted the government to succeed. They also believed in politics as a tool for national survival. After all, the right to be political was what they had fought the Revolutionary War for. The usually astute French ambassador, Louis-Guillaume Otto, rather cynically remarked in 1790: “The intrigues, the cabals, the underhanded and insidious dealings of a factious and turbulent spirit are even much more frequent in this republic than in the most absolute monarchy.” But the turbulence he was describing was just republican government at work.

The urgencies of transactional politics aside, Madison and his colleagues also believed in persuasion over power-driven argument, in accommodating divergent views, and in a willingness to make painful compromises for the greater good. Put another way, they relied on their own character, on their trust in the character of their fellow men, and on the kind of humane values that are deeply rooted here at Hampden-Sydney.

Americans today bemoan political partisanship, not entirely without reason. But partisan battles in the early republic could be savage, too. Take the struggle for the first amendments. We rightly think of the Bill of Rights as one of the most majestic components of our constitutional system. But many members of the First Congress didn’t want them at all. Federalists complained that tampering with the new Constitution would “throw everything into confusion.” Others argued that if the Constitution was treated as something “sacred” and untouchable what was the point of permitting amendments at all? Madison took on the responsibility of compressing the more than two hundred proposed amendments down to twelve, of which ten would ultimately be ratified as the Bill of Rights, although it was never called that then. No one at the time was happy with the result. South Carolina Congressman Aedanus Burke complained that the amendments that were finally enacted were “little better than whip-syllabub, frothy and full of wind, formed only to please the palate.”

We sell the founders short when we imagine that today’s messy political battlefields cannot also produce results that may also be of lasting value. And we sell ourselves short when we imagine that the men and women like us who represent us today are somehow made of lesser human material than our ancestors.

No one opposed the new government, the Constitution, and Madison more vigorously than Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, and the country’s paramount advocate for the rights of states against strong central government. Frankly, he hated the Constitution. “The principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous,” he declared in 1788, predicting that the new government it created would “oppress and ruin the people.” The following year, he did everything he could to sabotage Madison’s election to Congress. But even Henry resigned himself to results that he had fiercely resisted. “Altho’ the Form of Government into which my Countrymen determined to place themselves had my Enmity, yet as we are one & all embarked, it is natural to care for the crazy Machine, at least so long as we are ought of Sight of a Port to refit,” he wrote to his protégé James Monroe after the close of the First Congress.

Both Madison and Henry were of course gentlemen of their time. But as Henry Adams implied, our ancestors had no monopoly on virtue. One of the most virtuous public men I have ever known lived not far from here, in Lunenberg County. His name was Nathaniel Lee Hawthorne. He was a World War II veteran who served in a racially segregated unit and was badly wounded in the Italian campaign. When I met him in 1967, he was the county chairman of the NAACP. I was a college kid helping him to register disenfranchised African-American voters. He was threatened, harassed, shot at, and accused of crimes he never committed. His rectitude was quiet but unbreachable. He also possessed extraordinary physical courage. One day, he walked into the middle of a Ku Klux Klan rally on the steps of the county court house to prove that African Americans weren’t afraid of them. (I know all this because I was with him that day.) If ever a man had reason to despair of his country it was Hawthorne. But he believed fiercely in it, and – like Madison and Henry – he also believed in the moral fortitude of his fellow men. He was, in every respect, a gentleman. And his battle for fairness in Lunenberg County was not so very different in its essentials from the one that Madison and his colleagues waged in New York two hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

In government, times are always tough, and the future always uncertain. We may wish to return to a kinder and gentler, more inspiring, more honorable, or more enlightened time. But every age has been as fraught with anxiety and dread as our own. In a sense, we are always, in Patrick Henry’s words, “ought of Sight of a Port.” History can’t guarantee us that our future will be bright, or ensure that when the political wheel turns, as it must, it will restore our world as it was before. Rather, history tell us that our political reality was never trouble-free to begin with.

Times of trial are not something for us to fear: crisis also reveals the essential character of a man. We will continue to struggle for the ideals and policies that we believe in. But lasting victory can never be achieved without compromise, and compromise can never be achieved without respect for one’s adversaries. Madison knew it. So did Patrick Henry. So did Nathaniel Lee Hawthorne. When we despair, we would do well to turn to Madison and Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and others like them who brought common values of fairness and tolerance to the political world that we live in. All of them faced crises that tried their souls. Times of crisis also give birth to creative solutions. Just because we cannot see them at the moment does not mean that they don’t exist.

For almost two hundred and fifty years Hampton-Sydney has been committed to shaping character that will endure, and not falter amidst the turbulence of the moment. Its mission to form good men and good citizens is today more urgently needed than ever, as we navigate the personal and public challenges that will inescapably emerge to confront us as our lived history unfolds. Its commitment to teaching and embodying the values of mutual respect, open-mindedness, clear reasoning, and clear language are the blood and sinews of our society. Civility will never become obsolete. Honor need not grow feeble with age. These benchmarks of Hampden-Sydney’s purpose will remain forever vital not just to the molding of its graduates’ character, but to that of the nation.

Fergus standing with His Excellency at Washington’s Crossing.

Thanks to the folks at Washington Crossing Historic Park in PA, Washington Crossing Park Assoc in NJ, Labyrinth Books of Princeton, Farley’s Bookshop of New Hope, and Frank and Patty Lyons of Yardley, PA’s Continental Tavern for hosting me and sharing these photos. The event was a great success and we had a fine dinner at the Continental Tavern.

Fergus discussing The First Congress.

Fergus speaking about The First Congress at Washington's Crossing.

Fine owed by George Washington for overdue library books now $300,000
 
Founder of a nation, trouncer of the English, God-fearing family man: all in all, George Washington has enjoyed a pretty decent reputation. Until now, that is.
 
The hero who crossed the Delaware river may not have been quite so squeaky clean when it came to borrowing library books.

 
Continue reading at The Guardian.
 

Calling the House to Order | By Mark Spencer
 
‘We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us,” James Madison said of the harrowing task facing the First Congress assembled at Federal Hall, its temporary home in New York City. While historians write much about the ideological origins of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the drafting of the Constitution (1787), the First Federal Congress (1789-91) gets short shrift. That is unfortunate. While the Revolution launched America’s political experiment and the Constitution provided a theory and a mode of government, the First Congress defined how American government would work in practice. Many of the questions it faced, Fergus M. Bordewich notes, were vast in scope: “Was the president to have independent power? Or was he to be a figurehead, an agent of Congress? Where did the power of government lie? Was the Senate an executive body or a legislative one? How were the powers of the two branches to be reconciled?” Nobody knew. Mr. Bordewich guides us through the answers in “The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government.”
 
Center stage in this story are Congress’s 95 members. They included Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, the “American Demosthenes;” Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, “one of the House of Representatives’ most respected members;” Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, “a hardheaded businessman and no sentimentalist;” and Virginia’s Madison, about whom Mr. Bordewich writes, “no man contributed more to the achievements of the First Congress.” Others also played prominent roles in the creation of a practical government: President George Washington; Vice President John Adams; various cabinet ministers, particularly Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson; and miscellaneous lesser figures such as Alexander McGillivray, “the remarkable” Creek chief who was “the son of a Scottish trader and a mixed French-Indian mother.” An unlikely hero, of sorts, was the “rigid, thick-skinned, and socially maladroit” Sen. William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who kept a diary of the Congress’s daily proceedings. For many debates, his cranky voice is the only record.

 
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
 

Read the full article titled “City History, and Vantages, Often Overlooked” by Sam Roberts here. The First Congress will be out tomorrow as well and you can find it here.

“America begins in New York,” Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University professor and editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, likes to say. Now comes the journalist and author Fergus M. Bordewich to engagingly revive the forgotten story of the nearly 18 months that New York was the nation’s first capital in “The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government” (Simon & Schuster, $30).

As the author instructively recalls, that first Congress fleshed out the bare bones of the recently ratified Constitution in two sessions that were probably the most productive in its history — a claim vindicated through prodigious research by the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University.

Congressmen, representing only 11 states, convened at Peter Charles L’Enfant’s renovated Federal Hall downtown. These learned men loftily managed to compromise on most issues (though closing their eyes to others, like the slave market practically across the street) while enduring the clatter of horse-drawn traffic outside their windows and the noise of insatiable spectators cracking nuts in the public gallery of the House of Representatives.

Wilson is now the latest target in proliferating demands to topple monuments and reputations that honor long dead Americans tainted by racism. Students at Yale are engaged in a similar, much publicized campaign to remove John C. Calhoun’s name from one of the university’s undergraduate colleges. A former vice president, and a senator who was a member of the “Great Triumvirate” that also included Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, Calhoun, who died in 1850, regarded African-Americans as fundamentally “low, degraded, and savage.” He adored slavery and defended it tenaciously, declaring that it ennobled masters and slaves alike, and formed the foundation of true republicanism, by creating the affluence and leisure for white men to engage in self-government.

His advocacy for slavery was accompanied by a broader disdain for mass democracy  and its basic freedoms, even for white men, which he claimed led only to “violence, injustice, and anarchy.” He mocked the assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men were born free and equal, declaring, “There is not a word of truth in the whole proposition,” adding that “the attempt to carry into practice this, the most dangerous of all political error…has done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization than all other causes combined.” He advocated that police powers, and censorship of both speech and the press be imposed on the rest of the country to silence slavery’s enemies, and actively fostered, if he did not invent, the South’s antebellum narrative of perpetual resentment and grievance. At a time when Congress was gridlocked and Civil War threatened, in 1850, he stood out among his contemporaries as the leading enemy of compromise.

Calhoun’s legacy remains a vital if too little acknowledged part of American politics today. It survives in appeals to racism cloaked in anodyne present-day appeals to “states rights,” in the continued devaluation of black lives, and in the kind of cultural purism that wishes to build walls against immigrants in the guise of patriotism and “self-defense.”  Calhoun of course cannot be blamed for every retrograde tendency in twenty-first century American politics. But nor should his ghostly influence be underestimated.

Wilson’s record pales beside Calhoun’s contempt not only for blacks but also for basic democratic values. Although Wilson’s policies on race were shameful, they must be balanced against his commitment to political reform, which resulted in the passage of a raft of progressive legislation – the Federal Reserve Act, creation of the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Farm Loan Act, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, and much more – as well as his advocacy for the League of Nations and self-determination of the world’s oppressed colonial minorities. His contributions to the liberalization of American government and to the export of America’s higher political values were significant and lasting. Calhoun, by contrast, did more than any other American politician in history to sow suspicion of the federal government, to undermine democracy, and to rationalize authoritarian tendencies in the United States.

It may prove relatively easy to remove Calhoun’s his name from the college that bears it. But it will not scrub his reactionary legacy from the body politic. The more difficult challenge is to confront the pernicious thinking that he championed and that Wilson was heir to. Princeton students, and the rest of us, will benefit more from a fully rounded understanding of Wilson, who illustrates disturbingly but not all that uncommonly how racism can coexist alongside the highest idealism. He deserves to retain his place in the American political pantheon, tainted though it may be: Calhoun does not.

For a roadmap through the legislative combat zone that almost surely lies in store, today’s senators and congressmen might look for inspiration to the supremely pragmatic lawmakers who piloted Congress through the longest, and arguably the bitterest, debate in American history to pull the nation back from the brink of war and craft the Compromise of 1850.

Congress had already struggled unsuccessfully for two years to decide whether to extend slavery into or ban it from the vast new territories the United States had conquered in the Mexican War. The crisis came to a head in 1849 when Gold Rush settlers in California petitioned for admission as a free state, upsetting the precarious balance of fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in the U.S. Senate. Threats of southern secession were rampant. Congress was so badly deadlocked that many Americans expected civil war to break out within weeks. “We are on the very eve of bloodshed in the capital,” warned the New York Herald. “There is no telling when its crimson streaks may deluge the halls of Congress.”
The ten-month-long debate that extended until September of 1850 was not a pretty spectacle. Before it was over, mortal threats would be made, punches thrown, and guns drawn on the floor of Congress.

Henry Clay of Kentucky–respected for fathering national compromises in 1820 and 1833–proposed an omnibus bill webbed with new compromises which he argued would end the nation’s entire controversy over slavery: California would be admitted as a free state; territorial governments would be formed in the rest of the Mexican Cession with no mention of slavery; Texas would abandon its claims to New Mexico, and in return the U.S. government would pay off that state’s yawning debts; the slave trade in Washington, DC would be ended, but the legality of slavery itself there would be reaffirmed; finally, a new fugitive slave law would impose harsh punishment on anyone who aided runaways.

Clay’s allies transcended party allegiances. They included the aged Massachusetts Whig Daniel Webster, pro-slavery Mississippi Unionist Henry Foote, and the populist Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, at thirty-seven the youngest member of the Senate. Failure to compromise, Clay warned, would mean the nation’s disintegration into confederacies of the South, New England, the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes region, and the Far West.

The opposition to compromise was formidable. It included both hardcore defenders of slavery led by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who believed that slavery had been “established by Almighty God,” northern abolitionists who believed that there was a higher law than the Constitution which commanded Christians to oppose any appeasement of the Slave Power, and other politicians who objected to one or another of Clay’s proposals.

Clay had hoped to win over the ideological extremists by means of moral persuasion. He failed. Instead, the enemies of the omnibus united against it.

Douglas, whose ferocious energy caused him to be dubbed “a steam engine in britches,” then stepped into the vacuum left by the exhausted Clay. After studying the voting patterns that had killed the omnibus, the squat, hard-drinking Douglas deduced that enough different combinations of votes existed to pass the measures piecemeal, anchored on a core group of dependable “moderates.” He surmised correctly, for instance, that he could get enough anti-slavery men to vote for California statehood and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, and enough southern firebrands to vote for the fugitive slave bill, which he could pass separately. It was a strategy that depended less on patriotic appeals and soaring oratory than on tireless negotiations, which were carried out as often as not over jugs of wine in the snack bar just off the Senate floor, where one senator after another might find himself in Douglas’s bearlike embrace.

Within a few weeks, Douglas had passed every piece of Clay’s compromise, although only a few senators voted for every part of it. The House of Representatives soon followed suit. It was a triumph for aggressive pragmatism. “No man and no party has acquired a triumph, except the party friendly to the Union,” Douglas declared.

At one point in the debate, Daniel Webster fixed his famously intimidating gaze on the arch-sectionalist John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and caustically declared: “In all such disputes, there will sometimes be found men with whom everything is absolute; absolutely right, or absolutely wrong. They are apt, too, to think that nothing is good but what is perfect, and that there are no compromises or modifications to be made in consideration of difference of opinion or in deference to other men’s judgment. If their perspicacious judgment enables them to detect a spot on face of the sun, they think that a good reason why the sun should be struck from heaven.”

Clay, Douglas and Webster were all derided as hypocrites by many in their own day. But they were not afraid to sacrifice popularity to cut a deal that saved the United States from collapse. The compromise may have been what the historian Sean Wilentz has called an “evasive truce” that delayed but could not prevent, a final reckoning over slavery. But failure would likely have meant war, one which in 1850 the North might well have lost.

Compromise is the oil of American democracy. It is what our politicians are, in part, elected to do. If they insist on ideological purity they will always fail us, or doom themselves to rancorous irrelevance. As they gird themselves for the truculent battles to come this year, they would do well to remember Webster’s words.

The six articles included in “The Looming Conflict” appeared at different times in Smithsonian Magazine. They all combine, to differing degrees, a narration of historical events with first-hand reporting, and commentary by noted historians, among them Harold Holzer, David Reynolds, Orville Vernon Burton, John Stauffer, and others. Three of the pieces focus on events that led up to the Civil War: the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the long rivalry between pro-southern President James Buchanan and radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. Two more are war pieces, on the attack on Fort Sumter and the events that led up to it, and on the heroic but ill-fated attack of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment against Fort Wagner, in Charleston harbor, in 1863. (Though a Union defeat, the battle was the heroic debut of African-American troops, and served as the climax of the 1988 film “Glory.”) The final article centers on the creation of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati. Although the Underground Railroad of course preceded the war, I saw the story of the museum’s creation as a way to look not only at the underground’s remarkable history but also at the way in which we may deal with the legacy of slavery and abolitionism today.

I’m as interested in how we relate to the American past as I am with history for its own sake. So nearly all these articles show people of our own time coming to grips with the past in a variety of ways. For instance, you’ll meet George Buss, a masterful Abraham Lincoln reenactor whose nuanced understanding of Lincoln’s speaking style provides a unique window into his performance in the 1858 debates; Jim Delle, a Pennsylvania archaeologist who led me into a newly discovered underground cistern behind the Lancaster Pennsylvania home of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, where the abolitionist apparently hid fugitive slaves; preservationist Blake Hallman, who took me to splendidly, eerily isolated Morris Island, the site of Fort Wagner, where fragments of shattered cannonballs still turn up in the sand; historian Carl Westmoreland, who discovered a former slave jail in rural Kentucky, and recovered it for the Freedom Center as its paramount symbolic relic of slavery; and many others.

While each story stands on its own as window into history, it will also (I hope) open a door on some aspect of our own time, whether it be the price a nation pays for indecisive political leadership, as in the case of James Buchanan, or the persistence of the passions that are still evoked by slavery and the Civil War, as will be seen in the successful effort to create a coalition of Sons of Confederate Veterans, African Americans, and ecologists to save Morris Island from development. And in our own era of international terrorism, what historical figure is more relevant – and troubling – than our own homegrown idealist and terrorist John Brown?

Many of you may already know that my latest book, America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union, was released on April 17th. With several other new publications in the offing, it seemed like the right moment to inaugurate this long-promised blog as a channel to communicate to you about my work, American history, and (occasionally) myself.

I’ll be delivering news about my current and upcoming writing projects, talking about history—mostly between the nation’s founding and post-Civil War Reconstruction—and ways in which the past continues to interpenetrate and shape the present.

When it seems apt, I’ll tie history to present-day events. I won’t shy away from controversy. But I promise not to rant, nor will I denigrate or insult anyone, present or past.

You’ll be hearing soon about my next work of history, American Dawn, a history of the First Congress, of 1789-1791, which I’ll be working on for the next couple of years, and which will be published by Simon & Schuster. The First Congress has often been overlooked in treatments of the Early Republic, but its importance was immense. It literally invented the United States government from the paper blueprint of the Constitution. What happened there, when it met in New York City still recovering from the ravages of the Revolutionary War, is a dramatic political tale in which we see the Founding Fathers as hard-headed but immensely creative politicians who took the fragile idea of nationhood and made it real. Their success was by no means a forgone conclusion.

You’ll also find, as time goes on, personal reflections, short essays, book reviews, and occasional travel writing about, perhaps, Harriet Tubman country on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, or the abolitionist heartland of upstate New York, or the astonishing Fort Jefferson (“Shark Island”) in the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys.

I MAY ALSO take a literary detour from time to time…

…perhaps with something about China, where I lived and worked in the early 1980s, and still write about from time to time. My review of Paul French’s terrific noirish true-crime thriller Midnight in Peking, set in Beijing in the eve of World War II, will soon be on my website.

…or perhaps about American Indian issues. Much of my childhood was spent around native American communities, and my book Killing the White Man’s Indian was a combination of reportage and history that explored the incredibly complicated relationship of Indians in the present-day U.S.

Before too long, I also hope to give you an early preview of the novel I’ve been writing about the consequences of the Civil War. It’s titled Confederates, and it’s set in the late 20th century…

I hope to be informative, entertaining, and at least sometimes surprising. As a “long” writer by both habit and temperament, the compacted form of blogging doesn’t come to me naturally. But I expect to eventually get the hang of it. I’ll strive to keep the tone informal, in the spirit of a friendly conversation, and to avoid the heavy notes of the lecture hall. New posts will appear regularly at least several times a month.

In my next post, I’ll be talking about my soon-to-be-released e-book, The Looming Conflict: Radicals, Rebels, and the Road to Civil War.