gilda_elise

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston: Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.

Led by a group of slave-owners, who then in the height of self-delusion called themselves “the chivalry,” the South would dive headlong into a destructive path that ended with secession. That so few men could cause the worst calamity the nation has known only goes to show how easily people can be maneuvered into going against their own best interests.

I found the words of William Russell, a London Times correspondent, especially telling after he visited the South once Sumter had been taken.

”The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words United Stares, the intense hatred of the Yankee on the part of these people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them. I am more satisfied than ever that the Union can never be restored as it was and that it has gone to pieces, never to be put together again in the old shape, at all events, by any power of earth.”

Of course, it would come together, but so many of the old grievances would remain, to be taken up by their descendants and those who still believe that they are entitled. It would remain, and infect those in other parts of the country.

The book reads almost like fiction, so compelling written that the reader can’t help but be drawn into the tragic events as they unfold. Mistakes are made which will continue to affect the country as the years pass.

Going by recent events, the demon is still with us.