And the War Came

No one knew what was coming. For all the portents—the comets and meteors, the half-finished domes and monuments—a "violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle," to borrow a phrase of Lincoln's, was not what anyone expected, though some feared it. Not James Chesnut of South Carolina. He boasted that one would be safely able to drink all the blood spilled in establishing the Confederacy. Others, as well, doubted that secession would lead to war; or they believed that if war erupted, it would be a brief and decisive affair.

Two very different books take us back to the secession winter of 1860-61 and to the months between the assault on Fort Sumter and Bull Run. Adam Goodheart, a young historian who learned his craft writing for magazines and newspapers—not in seminar rooms heavy with historiography—offers a lyrical work of literary nonfiction; Emory Thomas, emeritus professor of history at the University of Georgia and one of the leading scholars of the Confederacy, offers a personal meditation on the horrors of war. Goodheart's work is over 400 pages with notes; Thomas' barely reaches 100. Goodheart tells stories; Thomas makes judgments. Each book, in its own way, invites us to consider the purposes of historical writing.

"Night fell at last." With that simple opening sentence of 1861, we are placed in the hands of a storyteller. Goodheart's aim is to situate the reader alongside numerous individuals and to recover the immediacy of experience. He includes a portrait of Jessie Benton Fremont and offers a riveting account of Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, the first slaves who escaped to Fortress Monroe. But the core of the book is a study of elite men: John J. Crittenden, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Abner Doubleday, Elmer Ellsworth, Thomas Starr King, Nathaniel Lyon, and Benjamin Butler. Knowing the names does not mean we know the stories, and it is in the telling of those stories that Goodheart transports readers to the winter and spring of 1861 and places them at the contingent center of decisions made and actions taken.

Goodheart begins with Ralph Farnham, age 104, supposedly the last surviving hero of Bunker Hill, even though he hadn't actually fought there. We follow Farnham on a trip to Boston, and this device allows Goodheart to introduce one of his themes: the search for heroes in what felt like a decidedly post-heroic age. "America in 1860," he observes, "was much like Old Uncle Farnham: making its way as best it could from the Revolutionary past into the revolutionary future, and facing the present sometimes with fuddled confusion, sometimes with unexpected grace" (p. 27). Asked who he was going to vote for in the presidential election, Farnham responded "for the Rail-Splitter." Goodheart wryly observes that "it is hard to imagine today how some lengths of old lumber could electrify a large tentful of jaded politicos—let alone much of the nation" (p. 35). But the symbol worked wonders as the epitome of strength and simplicity, and it helped carry Lincoln to election. The chapter ends with the news that, seven weeks after Lincoln's election, Farnham died. "The country," Goodheart insists, "would have to look to the future for its heroes" (p. 55).

And so each of the chapters that follow the first is in some way a search for a worthy hero and a meditation on how the conflict diminished the reputations of some while forever burnishing those of others. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky belonged to an older generation. Born in 1787, he first served as a senator in 1817. Crittenden tried to solve the crisis of secession through compromise, and he proposed a number of amendments to the Constitution that would grant concessions to slaveholders—recognizing slavery below 36 degrees, 30 minutes of north latitude, as existing and protected by the...