What happens to a federal fort when the state it’s located in tries to secede from the country?
That’s basically the premise of this book.
I really admire Larson’s decision to write a whole book all about the lead up to the attack on Fort Sumter and the Civil War. I had no idea just how much was going on there. I also hadn’t realized that Lincoln’s election was the catalyst for secession.
I had known that the tension between slave states and free states had been building, pretty much since the Revolutionary War. And I had known that South Carolina seceded right around Christmas of the year before Lincoln took office. But I hadn’t realized that southerners were so afraid of Lincoln ending slavery (despite the fact that he said over and over again that he had no intention of doing so) that they decided to leave the Union and form their own country.
So, if you think about it, by freaking out over what they thought Lincoln might do and trying to leave the Union, they forced Lincoln’s hand and brought about the end of slavery. If they wanted to keep their “way of life,” all they had to do was nothing. Instead they started a historically large war that decimated the country and ended slavery.
So, the book starts when Lincoln wins the election and goes all the way up until the battle at Fort Sumter. It bounces back and forth between Lincoln, Major Anderson at Fort Sumter, and various people in both the Union and the Confederacy. Prior to Lincoln’s inauguration, Buchanan and his team get some page time to show how badly they bungled the situation so that, by the time Lincoln took over, the situation was hopeless.
Even sending supplies to Fort Sumter was considered an act of aggression according to the Confederacy.
And if Lincoln’s administration did anything that could be construed as “aggressive” they risked pissing off other states and prompting them to secede. So he was really between a rock and a hard place.
For the most part, I found the similarities between their situation and ours oddly comforting. I liked seeing that we’ve been here before and survived, which gives me hope that we can survive it again.
Other similarities just made me want to throw the book across the room, specifically the fact that a member of the Supreme Court was corresponding with traitors of the country.
I was also frustrated by the willingness of those in the free states to compromise on behalf of those in the Confederacy, despite the fact that those in the Confederacy felt absolutely no need to do the same. The fact that that trend has continued just makes me more frustrated with the whole situation.
After all, if you don’t make it clear to a child that their behavior is unacceptable right away, they think they can misbehaving with impunity, and here we are.