Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (review)

Nelson Lankford’s Cry Havoc! attempts to make sense of the eight critical weeks between the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1861, and the beginning of military conflict between the Union and the new Confederacy. By the spring of 1861, a series of events—John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 and the election of Lincoln about a year later—had apparently plunged the country toward national disintegration. Most narratives tell this story with an aura of inevitability, and, to his credit, Lankford, in this engaging narrative, opens up possibilities of contingency and alternatives. Rather than certain, the road to Civil War was “crooked.” This was a story, he says, that “did not have to turn out the way it did” (235).

The chief concern of Cry Havoc! is with the northern Border South states of Maryland and Virginia: the first a state that remained in the Union, the second a state that seceded. Lankford says nothing about the Deep South’s secession (which occurred prior to the beginning of his story) and next to nothing about the rest of the slaveholding Border South. He ignores Kentucky and Missouri, which did not secede, as well as North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, which did. In all of these states, public opinion swung against immediate secession in early 1861, in all of them there was a surviving partisan political culture that sustained debate, and in all a similar mix of unionists and secessionists battled it out in which unionists had the upper hand until South Carolina’s bombardment of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861. An especially intriguing state that Lankford passes over is North Carolina, whose reluctance to join the Confederacy paralleled Virginia’s. Unionists in North Carolina, like in Virginia, maintained enough political power to delay consideration of secession, and when a convention vote was held in February 1861, it was roundly defeated by popular referendum. The critical turning point for moderate unionists in North Carolina was the onset of war and the beginning of a Union invasion of the South. There is a probably apocryphal but nonetheless gripping tale about Zebulon Vance, a Whig congressman who later became North Carolina governor and senator, who was delivering a speech when news came by telegraph about Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers. He raised his hand as a unionist, Vance later said, but “it fell slowly and sadly by the side of a Secessionist” (Gordon D. McKinney, Zeb Vance: North Carolina’s Civil War Governor and Gilded Age Political Leader [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004], 76.)

Cry Havoc! concerns mostly Maryland and Virginia, with much more about Virginia. In many respects, the Old Dominion, a Confederate centerpiece, deserves Lankford’s full attention. It hosted the southern capitol in Richmond and became the main scene of the Civil War’s military struggle. But Virginia was hardly typically southern, and perhaps not even typical of the Upper South. It possessed one of the largest and most diverse urban populations of any state south of the Mason-Dixon; it was the most industrialized of any slave state; it contained a large and geographically dispersed nonslaveholding population; and its commercial ties to the northern economy were extensive.

In most respects, Cry Havoc! provides compelling reading. Although scholars of the period will find little that is new, Lankford skillfully masters a large literature, and he explores the rich primary sources. Lankford is especially effective in portraits of the collection of personalities on the scene during Virginia’s secession crisis. This is not an analytical work; Lankford makes little attempt to untangle the complex forces that he describes, but, as narrative history, this is nonetheless successful. Lankford writes with verve and grace, and this is a book that will attract a solid general audience.