Mr. Book just finished Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln And Spurred The Civil War, by Jon Grispan.

This book was published in May 2024. The author is a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The Wide Awakes were a group of young northerners who formed a militant group to try to fight the suppression of abolitionist speech.

As the book points out, in 1857, just 2% of the population owned slaves, but still slave owners had control of the government from the time of the founding to the Civil War. I make the argument that this supports the fact that the United States certainly was not a democracy, it was an oligarchy. While I had known that the percentage of slave holders was small prior to reading it, finding out that the figure was just 2% was really the only interesting thing in the entire book.

While reading this book, I kept on wondering three things: when will it start to get interesting, when will I even start caring about what happens with this group and when the author make the case that this group elected Lincoln. The answer to all three questions were the same one word answer: never.

I give this book an F.

Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.

Mr. Book finished reading this on December 11, 2024.