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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History in Miniature, March 5, 2001
You will probably be hard pressed to find anything memorable about the year 1831, which is a year unassociated with any particular battle or epochal event. Nonetheless, _1831: Year of Eclipse_ (Hill and Wang) by Louis P. Masur puts that American year under a historian's microscope and shows how the people making history then were bringing on the American future, for better or worse. It was a year of eclipse, literally. On 12 February, there was a total eclipse of the sun that crept up the eastern seaboard. Some writers celebrated that people would be seeing the simple mechanics of the solar system following the laws of planetary motion, and that no modern would take the eclipse to mean a token of divine displeasure. It wasn't quite true; another author wrote that there was "a kind of vague fear, of impending danger - a prophetic presentiment of some approaching catastrophe." Some citizens sought out their families, that they might all die together. Actually, the eclipse was an anticlimax, not as dark or dramatic as the newspapers had predicted, and they and almanac editors were condemned for the fizzle. But the eclipse was dramatic enough for one prophet, who "saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened - the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and the blood flowed in streams." These are the words of Nat Turner, a slave and a literate preacher, who in August executed his plan of slave rebellion in Virginia. The reports of the horrors of the rebellion galvanized Virginians, and shook their foundations of economic happiness. Masur reports on the insistence of southern states that they be able to practice "nullification" of federal laws they thought unjust, an insistence that had President Jackson threatening to use force against them. 1831 saw the testing of the first reaping machine, and a boom in the railroads. It found visitors to the new nation impressed and appalled that, as a Frenchman wrote, "The sole interest which absorbs the attention of every mind is _trade_. It's the national _passion_... Money is the god of the United States." Especially with reports from outside visitors, Masur's book gives an idea of just what sort of nation we were beginning to be. He describes the enthusiasm for religious revival, tent meetings that were supposed to bring reform of the individual and then of society. He describes the surprising political party of the Anti-Masons, who were sure that the Masons were the sort of conspiracy that some decry still today, who were the first third party in American history, and who invented the presidential nominating convention. He examines the first stirrings of a workers' movement. He shows Jackson as trying to hold the nation together, wiping out the Cherokee notions of nationhood, and destroying the National Bank which others saw as indispensable to the nation. What emerges is a sharply-written history in miniature, a panoramic view of an ordinary and extraordinary year during the maturing of the nation and the looming of the Civil War.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Uneasy Equipoise, May 4, 2003
In 1831 YEAR OF ECLIPSE, Lewis Masur suggests that 1831 was perhaps the pivotal year between the post-revolutionary era when America was busy enacting the promises of its great contracts, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and enjoying its new freedoms inscribed therein, and the pre-Civil War era, when all the underlying social and economic tensions submerged in those documents boiled to the surface. Skillfully he shows how these tensions were manifested in Nat Turner's rebellion, the founding of THE LIBERATOR by William Lloyd Garrison, the radical religious fervor of Charles Finney, the evangelist, and the industrial utopianism of Robert Dale Owen. He shows the rise of the anti-elite democrats as exemplified through Andrew Jackson's fight with the Federalists over the Bank of the United States, and the power of social censure as practiced by Washington's social elite when they forced Jackson's "firing" of certain cabinet members who condoned another member's too hasty remarriage after his first wife's death. The Anti Masonic convention in Baltimore in 1831-1832 is emblematic of the seizure of power from the Federalists. He shows us how the genocide of the Cherokee's Trail of Tears was prompted by designs of speculators for their land, and how Marshall and the Supreme Court acceded to those expansionist desires through a peculiar reading of the status of the Cherokee status as a "nation" was revised to "citizens" so they could be removed at will. The Nullification "movement" over tariffs also came to head, and though the South did not withdraw from the Union, the States Rights doctrine which became the ideology of the slavocracy was put definitively into play. The chapter covering abolition and slavery, especially the pithy telling of the Nat Turner story and the furor and fear this small "revolution" set off is particularly well-told. Particularly striking is that Turner (who had taught himself to read) saw in the 1831 solar eclipse a portent from heaven that it was time to kill his oppressors. Using the lessons of the Bible, he cast himself as a redeemer who would free his people through a conflagration and bloodshed. Although the revolution was short-lived, Turner's rebellion had an enormous impact on Southern fears, serving to reinforce and justify the prevailing military and concentration camp culture. At the same time, Garrison's "Liberator" began to become a thorn in the side of slavers who considered such tracts as direct interference in their business. The Liberator and other abolitionist newspapers, books and tracts are banned from circulation by the slavocracy. Masur amply shows that America in 1831, the promises of the revolution were being enacted in ways the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen and would not have endorsed. Contrary to their program, where a benevolent oligarchy of elite planter and merchant families would administer America to the obedient masses, a new more democratic America was taking shape. Max Weber, according to Lipset in "American Exceptionalism" believed changinng liberal societies be likened to a game of dice where the dice were "loaded" by tradition. And as time went on the dice became more and more "loaded" as the accretions of time and custom were sedimented into the society, eventually creating framing stories and commonsense views that closed the foundations of society to debate. 1831 was a watershed year, a year in which some sluices were opened and others closed, a time when the roiling waters of liberty and democracy were undermining the foundations of elites, when the promises of revolutionary America were being extended to, revoked from, or taken up focibly by its people. It is a fascinating time, and "1831 Year of Eclipse" lays out the key events of this era with admirable clarity.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Micro History, August 10, 2003
This review is from: 1831: Year of Eclipse (Paperback)
Louis Masur titillates the reader with the title of his book. It is a clever way to draw the prospective reader into reading the book. The potential reader is led to believe the astronomical phenomena of the eclipse of 1831 in some way influences this pivotal year in American History. While a clever method of presentation, the reality is that with the exception of a couple of vague references; the two events are never really tied together by Masur. The author begins with an explanation of how the eclipse impacts life in 1831, but never really ties it into the rest of the book in a logical, meaningful fashion. Masur's inability to directly tie the eclipse into the events of 1831 and the surrounding years, however, should not distract the reader from this well researched and informative description of the changes taking place in the United States. The four chapters after the description of the eclipse delve into the major issues affecting the United States at this time, and the changes being wrought by these changes. Masur artfully transitions from one chapter to another building one upon the other in a logical sequence. Masur moves through these subjects providing the reader with as clear a picture one could get of the dynamics of these forces in and around 1831 which would not only shape the coming decades, but some of which resonate to this day.
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