To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds
The American West in the Aftermath of the Civil War
Description:... On the very day he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln expressed a desire to go West, to travel through the Rockies and then on to California. The congenitally melancholy President yearned for the convalescence promised there, and with the horrible war at last over, he proposed to Mary that they make the journey. The trip would be restful, reinvigorating. Lincoln was in an exuberant mood, Mary recalled, and she was startled by his great cheerfulness. The California Dream of life-changing wealth, aptly symbolized by carpenter James Marshall's discovery of a gold nugget in John Sutter's sawmill, was not even twenty years old in 1865. On that spring day at the White House, Abraham Lincoln mused about that promise- We shall have hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers, he told Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax. I am going to . attract them to the hidden wealth of our mountain ranges, where there is room enough for all.
Although Lincoln's journey would never take place, his wish encapsulates an often overlooked truth- the American West after the Civil War was a place of dreams and a landscape of healing for a war-scarred nation and its people. To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds tells the story of the American West after the Civil War, driven by linked stories of people searching for healing or redemption in the post-war West. Bill Deverell deftly incorporates the entire trans-Mississippi West into the post bellum period-not as a region isolated from history and the East, but as one fundamentally tied to the violence which brought the war about.
Historians have often thought of the West and the Civil War as two separate parts of American history, but Deverell's brilliant, narrative-driven history will show the role the West played in the national drama of Reconstruction and how it helped to heal a broken nation and its shattered soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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