The pages of history fetishize great figures, but what we call “greatness” is often the correction of generational dereliction, when a few people, touched by genius or blessed with high character, heal the rifts in a society caused by the many. Leo Tolstoy best captured this common view of Abraham Lincoln in particular, calling him “a Christ in miniature … bigger than his country [and] all the Presidents put together” — ironic for the author who wrote the greatest case for the opposing view of history, one driven by impersonal forces rather than exceptional individuals: War and Peace, first drafted in 1863, the decisive year of America’s Civil War that would leave over 600,000 dead. 

Robert W. Merry’s new book Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 underscores, however, the limitations of focusing too narrowly on exceptional personalities at the expense of broader historical context. A former journalist who covered Washington for the Wall Street Journal for a decade and the acclaimed author of biographies of James K. Polk and William McKinley and their times, Merry writes lucidly, often grippingly, about the political current of the age, as seen through the eyes of the lesser-known politicians of two states, Union Massachusetts and Confederate South Carolina — while the road to “compromise,” if there ever was one, narrowed to finality.