This book goes where no one since Nathaniel Hawthorne has tread.

Sounds promising, doesn't it? Certainly it did to me; I encountered an old, poorly-attested ballad about Jonathan Cilley, and picked up this book to find out more.

Cilley was a fast-rising Maine politician who, in 1838, as a new Democratic member of the U. S. House of Representatives, made a speech that was (probably correctly) interpreted as criticizing a disreputable Whig newspaper editor, James Watson Webb. Webb wanted to know if he was indeed the target, and he wanted to tell off Cilley. But he couldn't get to Cilley at the House, so he asked a Whig representative, William Graves, to deliver a note. Graves somewhat reluctantly agreed -- and was brushed off by Cilley. Graves suddenly found himself in the middle of the Cilley/Webb conflict, and because Cilley wasn't taking him seriously, challenged Cilley to a duel.

Cilley, as a northerner, had no part in dueling culture, and his friends were no more knowledgeable. It frankly sounds as if they painted Graves into a corner in which he had no choice but to challenge Cilley, even though Cilley and Graves personally had no quarrel. Cilley, rather than refuse the challenge, chose to duel with rifles, and on the third exchange of shots, Graves killed Cilley.

The result was a lot of hemming and hawing by congress, but they didn't really halt dueling; it continued in the South for many more years.

It's an interesting story, and it was due for a good history -- the only previous attempt at a biography of Cilley was by Hawthorne, who had gone to college with Cilley and considered him a friend. That biography was short and dated and due for a newer replacement. Sadly, this book doesn't really do the job very well.

For starters, there is no index -- even though the book is new enough (2016) that it could have been auto-indexed even if they weren't willing to pay a real indexer. Given the number of names that appear, most of whom show up only once or twice and are easily forgotten, that is a terrible lack. There is a sort of dramatis personae in the Epilogue, listing what happened to the main figures after Cilley was dead, but that includes only a few names -- and besides, you don't know it's there until you get to the end, so how can readers be expected to know it's there to refer to it.

And you'll probably wish you could go back and look things up, because this is not a very exciting book. The style, without being actually unreadable, is stodgy and full of distractions; the book is much too long for its subject matter. I frequently found myself skimming, looking for something that appeared to actually advance the narrative. I very possibly missed something that way -- I'm sure I missed a lot of references to characters that would have been useful knowledge later on -- but it was just too dull.

And, finally, the biography utterly failed in what it is presumably its chief purpose, which is to make us care about its subject. The Jonathan Cilley who comes out of this book was a bigot, sexist, unkind to his wife, exceptionally ambitious, impolite (that's what led to the duel), and stupid enough that he considered the vain, empty-headed future president Franklin Pierce to be one of his closest friends. If he had a mission in politics, other than the aggrandizement of Jonathan Cilley, follower of the worst policies of Andrew Jackson, I totally missed it. Having congressmen duel is probably not a good idea. But, in reading this book, I could not help but think that the world was better off without Jonathan Cilley, the Honorable Representative from the State of Narcissism. And I really doubt that that was Roger Ginn's goal. ( )