Publisher's Synopsis
A dynamic, timely history of nineteenth-century activists - from free-lovers and socialists to abolitionist vigilantes - and the social revolution they effected, though incompletely and imperfectly, in the turbulent Civil-War era On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the nation's fiftieth birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a sound political system and a growing economy-as well as the glaring inequalities that had undermined the American experiment from its beginning. The young country had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free? A new network of dissent, connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs and genteel parlors across the nation, vowed to finish the revolution they claimed the Founding Fathers had only begun. They were men and women, black and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation's radical ideals: the brilliant heiress Frances Wright, whose critiques of religion and the institution of marriage shocked the young nation; radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, whose commitment to non-violence would be tested as the conflict over slavery pushed the nation to its breaking point; Marx Lazarus, a vegan from Alabama whose calls for sexual liberation masked a dark secret; the black nationalist Martin Delany, the would-be founding father of a West African colony who secretly supported John Brown's treasonous raid on Harpers Ferry-only to ally himself with Southern Confederates after the Civil War. Tracing the period from 1817 through Reconstruction, American Radicals reanimates these largely forgotten figures in all their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The result is a surprising, panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers important lessons for today.
