ORDEAL OF THE UNION: Volumes 1-4 ...

ORDEAL OF THE UNION: Volumes 1-4 by Allan Nevins (Collier: $25 each; 524-589 pp . , illustrated). Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins devoted more than 20 years of his life to this epic study: He intended to trace the history of the United States from 1847 through Reconstruction, but had only reached 1865 when he died in 1970. Although he wrote (in a paraphrase of Walt Whitman), “No volume, or series of volumes, can do justice to the tremendous story of effort, devotion and valor, North and South, in the war which finally vindicated national unity,” historians agree that his vast chronicle does just that. The sweep of the narrative recalls the work of an earlier generation of writers, but Nevins approached his material with a modern combination of sympathy and objectivity. Even Millard Fillmore--one of the great nonentities of the 19th Century--is treated with scrupulous fairness: “a man of dignified bearing, suave manners, conciliatory temper, and limited powers of mind. The son of a poor farmer, he was largely self- educated and self-made.” Nevins’ thesis that the U.S. emerged from the ashes of the war as a stronger, more disciplined nation offers hope to citizens who wonder if the country can survive its current crises, but this voluminous, detailed history will appeal primarily to Civil War buffs.