Patricide in the House Divided

“One of the most ambitious, ingenious, and sophisticated works of psychohistory yet to appear. . . .Forgie’s thesis challenges an entire tradition of American historiography.” —David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books

George B. Forgie argues that the crisis of the Union was decisively structured by one obvious, overbearing fact: the dominant figures in American public life in the 1850s were born in the early Republic. They were raised to think of its founders as immortal fathers whom they must imitate, themselves as brothers, and the Union as an inherited house to be preserved.