The Sumter of All Things
WEST, WOODY
The Sumter of All Things Maury Klein's Wonderful Days of Defiance By Woody West As the 1860 election approached in a nation convulsively at odds with itself, Republicans had reason for optimism....
...In the blizzard of Civil War books—general histories, battle histories, regimental histories, biographies, essays, collections of letters, reprints of memoirs, and whatever else is dustily in the archives—even avid readers risk being overwhelmed...
...James Buchanan, timorous but hardly traitorous, was the wrong man in the wrong place at a calamitous time...
...It is not...
...The Democrats were sectionally fractured, and in the previous election, the first for the Republican party, presidential candidate John C. Fremont had carried 11 states...
...in the White House...
...Klein's intriguing insight and the theme of his book is this: "What Americans lacked above all else was a history...
...Hold those 11 states, win three others, and they should be Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times...
...20, 1860...
...Klein has written a masterly narrative of those chaotic months with an immediacy and human scale that is quite stunning—evolving around "a classic American dilemma, the unavoidable clash between law and conscience...
...The gridlock was as obvious as it was unbreakable...
...Among the effective bit players, there's the remarkable diarist George Templeton Strong, who stalked out of the Capitol to visit the Smithsonian, saying that he preferred "stuffed penguins and pickled lizards to the dishonest gabble of the Senate...
...Winfield Scott, emotionally attached to his native Virginia but steadfast in duty to the Union, "had become a man with a country but without a state...
...Once it became evident that there would be no concessions of extension of slavery into the western territories, Klein writes, secession became the explosive focus...
...the aged Army commander Gen...
...Thomas Corwin of Ohio would write in January 1861 as if in a fatal resignation, "Four or five States are gone others are driving before the gale...
...Any credible nominee should reach the White House, Republicans were confident—giddily confident, some of them...
...Klein briskly moves the momentum toward war from Washington to Charleston, with the harbor fort dominating the nation's attention after South Carolina seceded on Dec...
...Days of Defiance is a superb blending of the men and the igniting issues of the war...
...The war as well initiated a centralization of power in the national government that was hardly imaginable before...
...He last wrote for The Weekly Standard about J. Anthony Lukas's Big Trouble...
...More and more, Americans of North and South gazed into the abyss—and grew accustomed to the destiny to which they were rushing...
...Upon the ideological and cultural stage that was to give way under the terrible weight of historical convergences, Klein cues the principals and, flavorfully, dozens of lesser-known members of that memorable cast...
...Klein excels at acute characterizations...
...Ohio senator Ben Wade was "as crude and rough a piece of western lumber as could be found in Congress...
...Between the adamancies of North and South, the middle ground vanished...
...Not the least haunting aspect of the Civil War, as the author emphasizes, is that the nation continues to grapple with disagreements over governmental power and individual rights similar to the ones that killed more than 600,000 Americans 135 years ago...
...the candidate must be alive, and able to walk at least from parlor to dining room.'" That's the sort of engaging detail with which Maury Klein spices Days of Defiance...
...The narrative's pace has a telegraphic quality, not unlike the way the newly formed Associated Press was giving a new power and velocity to public opinion...
...With each passing week, the nation's capital increasingly reflected Macduff's anguished cry at Duncan's murder, "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece...
...Some believed secession was legal, others thought it legal but wrong, and still others considered it illegal...
...There are vivid portraits of Lincoln and Davis, as distinct in personality, style, and conviction as conceivable...
...Macaulay, check your e-mail...
...The horrendous blood-letting of the Civil War secured the Union to permit additional chapters to be written of America's noble, if often fitful, efforts to honor the founding ideals...
...Though the Constitution had been the basic document of governance for nearly three quarters of a century, America in April 1861 had less a national history than several brilliant chapters written and others in draft...
...The acidulous Henry Adams, writing of William Seward and Charles Sumner, who were incessantly combative during the futile months, says that "each was created only for exasperating the other...
...I am for the man who can carry Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Indiana,' declared Fitz-Henry Warren of Iowa before the convention, 'with this reservation, that I will not go into cemetery or catacomb...
...Seward is one of the most fascinating figures, astute, devious, initially condescending to Lincoln and certain of his own fitness to run the country, yet a man of principle and devotion to the Union...
...Days of Defiance might seem to be another pawing over of a period wholly familiar to readers, in the as-every-schoolboy-knows-category (T.B...
...Some argued that the use of force to prevent secession was illegal, others thought it legal but impractical or impolitic, while others still considered it legal and absolutely necessary to maintain national unity...
...Klein has taken as his subject the much-discussed five months that preceded the firing of the first shot at Fort Sumter, from the election of Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis's taking the oath as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama...
...I have looked on this horrid picture till I have been able to gaze on it with perfect calmness...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 6
