The Dominion of War Liberty and Empire in North America, 1500-2000

by Anderson, Fred; Cayton, Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780670033706
• ISBN10: 0670033707
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-29
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

Americans often think of their nation’s history as a movement toward ever-greater democracy, equality, and freedom. Wars in this story are understood both as necessary to defend those values and as exceptions to the rule of peaceful progress. In The Dominion of War, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton boldly reinterpret the development of the United States, arguing instead that war has played a leading role in shaping North America from the sixteenth century to the present.Anderson and Cayton bring their sweeping narrative to life by structuring it around the lives of eight men—Samuel de Champlain, William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. This approach enables them to describe great events in concrete terms and to illuminate critical connections between often-forgotten imperial conflicts, such as the Seven Years’ War and the Mexican- American War, and better-known events such as the War of Independence and the Civil War. The result is a provocative, highly readable account of the ways in which republic and empire have coexisted in American history as two faces of the same coin. The Dominion of Warrecasts familiar triumphs as tragedies, proposes an unconventional set of turning points, and depicts imperialism and republicanism as inseparable influences in a pattern of development in which war and freedom have long been intertwined. It offers a new perspective on America’s attempts to define its role in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of Crucible of War, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize in 2001.
Andrew Cayton, distinguished professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, is the author or editor of eight books, including Frontier Indiana and Ohio: The History of a People.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	vii
INTRODUCTION A View in Winter	ix
CHAPTER ONE Champlain's Legacy: The Transformation of Seventeenth-Century North America	1	(53)
CHAPTER TWO Penn's Bargain: The Paradoxes of Peaceable Imperialism	54	(50)
CHAPTER THREE Washington's Apprenticeship: Imperial Victory and Collapse	104	(56)
CHAPTER FOUR Washington's Mission: The Making of an Imperial Republic	160	(47)
CHAPTER FIVE Jackson's Vision: Creating a Populist Empire	207	(40)
CHAPTER SIX Santa Anna's Honor: Continental Counterpoint in Republican Mexico	247	(27)
CHAPTER SEVEN Grant's Duty: Imperial War and Its Consequences Redux	274	(43)
CHAPTER EIGHT MacArthur's Inheritance: Liberty and Empire in the Age of Intervention	317	(44)
CHAPTER NINE MacArthur's Valedictory: Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten	361	(48)
CONCLUSION Powell's Promise	409	(16)
NOTES	425	(78)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	503	(4)
INDEX	507

Excerpts

Introduction A VIEW IN WINTER The Mall in Washington, D.C., is a good deal less inviting in January than in April, when the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin burst into bloom and tourists loiter in the sun. But because the ways in which the Mall and its monuments give meaning to the events of American history are clearest in the winter?and because the story we have to tell is in many ways a wintry tale?it may not be amiss for us to begin on the Mall with the trees bare and the skies gray, walking down the path that leads from the Lincoln Memorial to the Vietnam War Memorial. In spring, the transition between the two would be muted by the trees and plantings of Constitution Gardens. In winter, the contrast is stark and unmistakable.Behind us, the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial leaves no doubt about the importance of the sixteenth president and the Union that he, more than anyone else, preserved. The steps that visitors must climb to enter the monument prepare them for what they find within: an immense, melancholy statue of the Great Emancipator, bracketed by the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address?majestic phrases that explain the meaning of the greatest blood sacrifice in American history. But the Vietnam Memorial makes no such unmistakable statement. We do not climb to meet this monument or even look up; we merely walk along a gradually descending path beside a polished granite wall. The only words inscribed on the stone are the names of 58,000 American women and men who gave their lives between 1959 and 1975, in the longest war the United States has ever fought. As we walk, the black wall seems to rise beside us, as if thrust from the earth by the columns of names that lengthen on its face. The roll of the dead begins almost imperceptibly at ground level, then rises inexorably?waist height, shoulder height, head height, higher?until at the monument?s center the names of the dead hang over us with an almost unbearable weight of sadness. Here we are left to draw our own conclusions by a monument that does not presume to instruct us on the meaning of the deaths to which it bears witness. And here, at the turning of the path where the twin walls join, we pause, as so many do, to look back. Because it is winter, the colonnade of Lincoln?s Greek temple looms white through the screen of trunks and bare branches, and it is suddenly clear that the narrowing V of the wall has been sited precisely to direct our gaze upward to the Memorial and to the hillside crosses of Arlington National Cemetery beyond. Turning again and looking up the path, it also becomes apparent that the oblique angle at which the walls join is not merely the product of Maya Lin?s superb aesthetic sense: the black arrow of the wall ahead points directly toward the marble shaft of the Washington Monument. Here, surrounded by wars laid up in stone, the questions press in on us. Why this location, half in seclusion apart from the center of the Mall? Why this orientation, directing our attention toward the two great monuments that define the Mall?s long axis? Why, for that matter, should the Korean War Memorial?less powerful emotionally but still evocative in its depiction of a rifle squad moving out, laden with combat gear?have been located in the counterpart space on the opposite flank of the Lincoln Memorial? And why, finally, do the facing halves of the new World War II monument bestride the Mall at the head of the Reflecting Pool, claiming a place as central as Washington?s obelisk and Lincoln?s Doric shrine? Silent though their stones may be, the monuments on the Mall speak unmistakably to Americans about the relationships between, and the relative importance of, five wars?the Revolution, the Civil War, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and World War II. Even stronger implicit messages can be discerned in the absence of monuments commemorating other conflicts