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. 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.” 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 fundamentally a history of hearts and minds, rather than of legislative bills and battles. But Goodheart’s version is at once more panoramic and more intimate than most standard accounts, and more inspiring. The election of Lincoln and the secession crisis is, of course, familiar terrain. 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.
Like many of the best works of history, “1861” creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine. Many good studies about the struggle will be published, but few will be as exhilarating as “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” 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. In 1995 one bibliographer estimated that more than 50,000 had been published, exploring every aspect of the conflict on and off the battlefield. More prosaically, that fateful first shot unleashed a barrage of books about the War Between the States. 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. Robert Anderson surrendered the battered fort to his former countrymen.
After 36 hours of shelling by Confederate cannons, United States Maj. 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.
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