Review by Debby Applegate, who is the author of “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. She is now writing a biography of the madam Polly Adler.
On the morning of April 12, 1861, the newly formed Confederate States Army opened fire on the federal garrison of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. After 36 hours of shelling by Confederate cannons, United States Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the battered fort to his former countrymen. The fall of Fort Sumter touched off four years of a civil war that would kill more than 620,000 soldiers and revolutionize American culture.
More prosaically, that fateful first shot unleashed a barrage of books about the War Between the States. In 1995 one bibliographer estimated that more than 50,000 had been published, exploring every aspect of the conflict on and off the battlefield. Thousands more have appeared since then.
Now, 150 years after the surrender of Fort Sumter, the journalist, travel writer and historian Adam Goodheart has let loose his own salvo in what will be a four-year firestorm of books commemorating the Civil War. Many good studies about the struggle will be published, but few will be as exhilarating as “1861: The Civil War Awakening.”
Like many of the best works of history, “1861” creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine. We are traveling, Goodheart writes in the prologue, to “a moment in our country’s history when almost everything hung in the balance.” Goodheart leads us on a journey through the frenzied, frightening months between Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 — followed with breakneck speed by the secession of the Confederate States and the outbreak of war — and July 4, 1861, when President Lincoln delivered his first message to Congress, laying out the case not only for the necessity of war, but for a more democratic vision of the United States.
The election of Lincoln and the secession crisis is, of course, familiar terrain. But Goodheart’s version is at once more panoramic and more intimate than most standard accounts, and more inspiring. This is fundamentally a history of hearts and minds, rather than of legislative bills and battles. He traces the process by which the states that did not secede evolved, in less than a year, from a deeply divided, intensely ambivalent and decidedly racist population into a genuine Union, united by the hope of creating a nation that would fulfill the promises of 1776. This is the story of the thousands of Americans who responded to the crisis, as Goodheart puts it, “not just with anger and panic but with hope and determination, people who, amid the ruins of the country they had grown up in, saw an opportunity to change history.”
So Goodheart turns the lens away from the usual stars of the story, the politicians, military officers, activists and editors who strove to direct the course of events. Instead, he explores the more obscure corners of antebellum America, introducing fascinating figures who loomed large at the time but have now been mostly forgotten.
Many of these are young men struggling to decide what manhood requires of them when the old models of patriotism, loyalty and self-interest were rapidly dissolving. In upstate Ohio, the irrepressible future president James Garfield was an idealistic state senator whose sense of Emersonian independence was increasingly affronted by the equivocation, self-censorship and unsavory compromises required to keep the slave states from seceding. In Chicago, Goodheart introduces young Elmer Ellsworth, whose boyhood dreams of glory led him to found the dashing Fire Zouaves, a military regiment composed of roughneck New York firemen but modeled on — and dressed in the exotic style of — the elite French forces in Algeria.
We glimpse the clerks and shopkeepers who organized themselves into secret political clubs called the Wide Awakes, who showed their support for candidate Lincoln by parading at night through the Northern cities in eerie silence, draped in makeshift capes of shiny black oilcloth that reflected the blaze of their flaming torches. Out in St. Louis, we visit the Forty-Eighters — reviled as the “Damned Dutch” by the Missouri secessionists — refugees from the failed revolution against the monarchs of the German Confederation, who discovered in the slaveholders “exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress.”
And in the Union stronghold of Fortress Monroe outside Hampton, Va. (about as far south as Goodheart ventures), we witness the remarkable encounter between the Union general Benjamin Butler and three slaves — Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, James Townsend — whose decision to liberate themselves ignited a sudden revolution in white attitudes toward emancipation.
Goodheart, the director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and a regular contributor to NYTimes.com’s Civil War blog, Disunion, combines a journalist’s eye for telling detail with the rigorous research of a good historian. But he gives his far-flung journey narrative tension and suspense by religiously following two fundamental rules of the novelist: first, make the reader care about your characters, then make the reader worry about them.
Goodheart excels at creating emotional empathy with his characters, encouraging us to experience the crisis as they did, in real time, without the benefit of historical hindsight. He lets the players speak for themselves and make the best case for their own motives and beliefs. Even more effective is his use of the technique of free indirect speech, subtly incorporating the distinctive language of the various characters into his own narration. For example: General Anderson would be “damned if he was to surrender — even worse, perform a shabby pantomime of surrender — before a rabble of whiskey-soaked militiamen and canting politicians.”
This is a particularly useful sleight of hand for the Civil War historian, who must recreate the feelings and rationalizations of a wide variety of people whose beliefs we might find incomprehensible or reprehensible — without sounding anachronistic or censorious, or seeming to endorse them. That same technique allows Goodheart to suggest the characters’ moral or intellectual blind spots, their failures of perception or their unpreparedness for the events to come. These moments are some of the most affecting in the book. They are also some of the funniest, as in Goodheart’s depiction of the boisterous Fire Zouaves arriving in drowsy, bureaucratic Washington:
“Waiting may have been the locals’ favorite pastime, but the New York firemen did not share their taste. After four days en route to the capital, cooped up on the steamer and then the train, they had expected and hoped to disembark straight into the thick of battle. (You could hardly blame them — it had been weeks since their last chance for even a good street brawl.) As they tumbled out of their train, a newspaperman had heard one Zouave ask: ‘Can you tell us where Jeff Davis is? We’re lookin’ for him.’ A comrade chimed in, ‘We’re bound to hang his scalp in the White House before we go back.’ Others squinted in perplexity, looking around for secession flags to capture but failing to discover any.”
The Zouaves’ situation turns tragic only a few weeks later, on the night of May 23, when their leader, the ebullient Ellsworth, impetuously decides to cut down a rebel flag that is flying over a Confederate sympathizer’s hotel, and is brutally killed. The young colonel was mourned as the first martyr of the war, inspiring over 200,000 men to join the Union Army. “Sumter’s fall had loosed a flood of patriotic feeling,” Goodheart observes, but “Ellsworth’s death released a tide of hatred, of enmity and counterenmity, of sectional blood lust. . . . Indeed, it was Ellsworth’s death that made Northerners ready not just to take up arms but actually to kill.”
Throughout “1861,” Goodheart shows how such small individual choices helped to decide momentous questions. A cascade of life-and-death decisions drives the book’s momentum from the beginning: Will the North elect Abraham Lincoln despite the South’s threats to secede? Once Lincoln is elected, will Congress be able to keep the South from leaving without committing the nation to slavery in perpetuity? Faced with the founding of the Confederacy, will the North let the slaveholders leave peacefully, capitulate to their demands, or embrace “the ideology of Freedom”? What will the West do, after years of being checked between Southern and Northern interests? Will the men of the North take up arms against their own people? What will happen to the slaves once war has come? Will the war become a fight to end slavery, or will it simply reunite the nation as it was?
The interplay of the intimate, the panoramic and the ironic reaches a heroic climax with these last two questions. The very day that Elmer Ellsworth died, General Butler encountered a dilemma in the form of the three fugitive slaves, who, before they escaped, had been helping build a Confederate artillery fortification across the harbor from Fortress Monroe. Butler’s course should have been clear. Legally, he was required to return the slaves to their owner. Politically, the general was bound by Lincoln’s vow that the federal government would not interfere with slavery — a position applauded by most Northerners.
But when the owner’s emissary arrived, waving a white flag of truce, to reclaim his runaway properties, Butler refused to turn them over. Since Virginia was no longer part of the United States, the wily general declared, and since the slaves had been aiding the rebel army, he was confiscating the men as “contraband of war.”
“Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war,” Lincoln’s assistants John Hay and John Nicolay observed. The befuddling logic of the “contraband doctrine” had a clarifying effect on the North. Those who decried “emancipation” as an unconstitutional attack on property rights found no objection when it was called “confiscation.” The impact among blacks was even more profound. Within weeks, slaves by the hundreds were flooding into “the freedom fort” and other Union bastions — without inciting a racial bloodbath, as many whites had long feared. It was the blow that sent slavery to its deathbed.
Not everyone will be enamored of “1861.” Some will object that it concentrates too much on the white men of the North, giving short shrift to women, blacks and Southerners. Readers hoping for a conventional war story might be put off by the book’s peripatetic structure. Skeptics may look askance at Goodheart’s unabashed optimism and open admiration of the Union cause in spite of the many ways it would fall short of its most noble goals. But readers who take “1861” on its own passionate, forthright terms will find it irresistible. And for those who don’t like this Civil War book, well, just wait — there are plenty more to come.
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