Great concept, deep historical backing, but way too much random detail and academic patina that should have been scraped off before shipping this to print.

Imagine one hundred more passages like this one:

“Jefferson showed that he was aware of the danger, when he noted that the “wholesome” “party divisions of whig and tory” served to “keep out those of a more dangerous character.” His famous “firebell in the night” remark, then, wherein he warned that “a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated,” was as much, if not more, a reiteration of his opposition to placing the slave question on the national agenda as it was a meditation on the immorality of slavery.”

Or this:

“Binns arrived in Baltimore, then a major port for southeastern Pennsylvania, on September 1, 1801, after a sea voyage of nine weeks. Kept away from the city by reports of yellow fever, the passengers stopped at a hotel a mile out of town. Binns later recalled, “What with bull-frogs, common frogs, tidetids, etc. etc., and negro huts, in which there was much shouting, screaming, and clapping of hands, my ears never before had been assailed by such a multitude of confused, unusual, and unmusical sounds.… At the hotel where we stopped, for the first time I ate cakes made of that delicious vegetable, Indian corn.” The next day, he set off on foot, accompanied by three wagons loaded with supplies he had brought with him. On his arrival in Harrisburg he hired a boat to carry him and his supplies to Northumberland, a lively commercial town on the Susquehanna River”

Editors are great things. I was not up to the task on this one, regrettably.