Will I love 1861?

How did the war start? Certainly, the South seceded after Lincoln’s election, but was apocalyptic war inevitable? Why did the North rise to defend the Union so passionately? If I may be so bold, Adam Goodheart’s 2011 book reads like the gripping sequel to my book.

In a series of powerful, beautifully written geographically and biographically focused stories, running from the 1860 election to the electric response to Fort Sumter, the rising of the state militias, the horrors of Bull Run, and the first moves toward emancipation at Fort Monroe.

In wonderful narrative form, Goodheart tracks the eruption of Union… show more.

The outbreak of the Civil War was not a single event as simple as the firing on Fort Sumter or reducible to a clear clash of ideologies. In this erudite yet intensely readable book, Goodheart captures with equal brio the grand sweep of events and the maneuvering of political men South and North, and – most compellingly of all – the dawning of the war in the lives of men and women both famous and unknown, from New England Transcendentalists, to the fiery abolitionist orator Abbey Kelley, to the wily lawyer-turned-soldier Benjamin Butler, whose clever legal maneuver early in… show more.