Affairs of Honor

The founding generation's politics as they actually lived it: a world of reputation, insult, rumor, and the duel, where honor was political capital and a slight could end in pistols at dawn. Freeman reconstructs the unwritten rules that governed the early republic's leaders and shows how personal the public business was. A bracing antidote to the marble-statue version of the founders. They were brilliant, petty, frightened, and armed, and the republic survived them anyway.

A historian of the early American republic and its political culture, read for how closely she attends to the way politics actually behaved. Affairs of Honor reconstructs the founding generation's world of reputation, insult, and the duel. The Field of Blood documents the physical violence on the floor of Congress in the years before the Civil War. She shows the republic as its participants experienced it, dangerous and personal and far from genteel.