"The most eloquent, understanding, and yet very candid biography of Fremont that has appeared to date"--Howard R. Lamar, Yale University
The career of John Charles Fremont (1813-90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its eighteenth-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Fremont's vital importance to the history of American empire, and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West.
As the most celebrated American explorer and mapper of his time, Fremont stood at the center of the vast federal project of western exploration and conquest. His expeditions between 1838 and 1854 captured the public's imagination, inspired Americans to accept their nation's destiny as a vast continental empire, and earned him his enduring sobriquet, the Pathfinder.
But Fremont was more than an explorer. Chaffin's dramatic narrative includes Fremont's varied experiences as an entrepreneur, abolitionist, Civil War general, husband to the remarkable Jessie Benton Fremont, two-time Republican presidential candidate, and Gilded Age aristocrat.
This new paperback edition of Pathfinder features a new, additional, updated introduction by the author.

In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreaking Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave had incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality. In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass - from its wild landscape (""I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway"") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a ""thorough and uncommonly graceful historian."" Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life. The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues - a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. (""Give us the facts,"" he had been instructed, ""we will take care of the philosophy."") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity. Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents - many heretofore unpublished - this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. Giant's Causeway - which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887 - shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.

In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreaking "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" had incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality.

In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass--from its wild landscape ("I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the "San Francisco Chronicle, " critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a "thorough and uncommonly graceful historian." Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.

The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues--a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. ("Give us the facts," he had been instructed, "we will take care of the philosophy.") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity.

Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln.

"Giant's Causeway"--which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887--shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.

Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and predicted what would be the ""four great measures"" of his administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals. And those milestones--along with his purported enunciation of them--have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals has become U.S. political history's equivalent of Babe Ruth's called home run of the 1932 World Series, in which the slugger allegedly gestured toward the outfield and, on the next pitch, slammed a home run. But then again, as Tom Chaffin reveals in this lively tour de force of historiographic sleuthing, like Ruth's alleged ""called shot"" of 1932, the ""four measures"" anecdote hangs by the thinnest of evidentiary threads. Indeed, not until the late 1880s, four decades after Polk's presidency, did the story first appear in print. In this eye-opening study, Tom Chaffin, author, historian, and, since 2008, editor of the multi-volume series Correspondence of James K. Polk, dispatches the thigh-slap anecdote and other misconceptions associated with Polk. In the process, Chaffin demonstrates how the ""four measures"" story has skewed our understanding of the eleventh U.S. president. As president, Polk enlarged his nation's area by a third--thus rendering it truly a coast-to-coast continental nation-state. Indeed, the anecdote does not record, and effectively obscures complex events, including notable failures--such as Polk's botched effort to purchase Cuba, as well as his inability to shape the terms of California's and the New Mexico territory's admission into the Union. Cuba would never enter the federal Union; and those other tasks would be left for successor presidents. Indeed, debates over the future of slavery in the United States--debates accelerated by Polk's territorial gains--eventually produced perhaps the central irony of his legacy: A president devoted to national unity further sectionalized the nation's politics, widening geopolitical fractures among the states that soon led to civil war. Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Met His Every Goal?--intended for general readers, students, and specialists--offers a primer on Polk and a revisionist view of much of the scholarship concerning him and his era. Drawing on published scholarship as well as contemporary documents--including heretofore unpublished materials--it presents a fresh portrait of an enigmatic autocrat. And in Chaffin's examination of an oft-repeated anecdote long accepted as fact, readers witness a case study in how historians use primary sources to explore--and in some cases, explode--received conceptions of the past.

On the evening of February 17, 1864, the Confederacy's "H. L. Hunley" sank the Union's formidable sloop of war the USS "Housatonic" and became the first submarine in world history to sink an enemy ship. But after accomplishing such a feat, the "Hunley" and her crew of eight also vanished beneath the cold Atlantic waters off Charleston, South Carolina. For generations, the legend of the "Hunley" grew as searchers prowled the harbor, looking for remains. Even after the submarine was definitively located in 1995 and recovered five years later, those legends have continued to flourish. In a tour de force of document-sleuthing and insights gleaned from the excavation of this remarkable vessel, the distinguished Civil War-era historian Tom Chaffin presents the most thorough telling of the "Hunley"'s story possible. Of panoramic breadth, this saga begins long before the submarine was even assembled and follows the tale into the boat's final hours and through its recovery in 2000. Engaging and groundbreaking, "The H. L. Hunley" provides the definitive account of a fabled craft.

Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette shared a singularly extraordinary friendship, one involved in the making of two revolutions - and two nations. Jefferson first met Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state's governor, in fighting off the British. The charismatic Lafayette, hungry for glory, could not have seemed more different from Jefferson, the reserved statesman. But when Jefferson, a newly-appointed diplomat, moved to Paris three years later, speaking little French and in need of a partner, their friendship began in earnest. As Lafayette opened doors in Paris and Versailles for Jefferson, so too did the Virginian stand by Lafayette as the Frenchman became inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of his country's revolution. Jefferson counseled Lafayette as he drafted The Declaration of the Rights of Man and remained a firm supporter of the French Revolution, even after he returned to America in 1789. By 1792, however, the upheaval had rendered Lafayette a man without a country, locked away in a succession of Austrian and Prussian prisons. The burden fell on Jefferson and Lafayette's other friends to win his release. The two would not see each other again until 1824, in a powerful and emotional reunion at Jefferson's Monticello. Steeped in primary sources, Revolutionary Brothers casts fresh light on this remarkable friendship of two extraordinary men.