And some of his scenes of life in Washington during those uncertain early days are, for better or for worse, indelible. While Doubleday was dreaming of medals, a fellow officer at Fort Sumter, assistant surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, was mailing off sketches of the fort to Harper’s Weekly for $25 apiece and taking copious notes for a book that (as he wrote his brother a month before the Confederate attack) “will be eagerly sought after, I think, and would certainly pay.” In the first few months after secession, Goodheart observes, Southern newspapers were filled with imaginary, panic-stricken reports of slaves plotting “insurrections,” so much so that the price of slaves fell to half or even a third of their value a year earlier as owners began to doubt their reliability, if not the future of the entire institution. Goodheart, a former op-ed editor at the New York Times, has a good eye for detail, both tragic and absurd. It is a route, he insists, that not only has been forgotten or neglected, but that holds the key to understanding how, “one person at a time, millions of Americans decided in 1861 - as their grandparents had in 1776 - that it was worth risking everything, their lives and their fortunes, on their country.”Īnd so to get “the full story,” Goodheart writes, it is necessary not only to look to the halls of power and the fields of battle, but “to go much farther afield: to the slums of Manhattan and the drawing rooms of Boston, to Ohio villages and Virginia slave cabins, and even to the shores of the Pacific.” Louis, William Tecumseh Sherman sat disconsolately at a desk, running the city’s horse-drawn streetcar line.Īdam Goodheart declares his intention at the outset of “ 1861,” his peripatetic exploration of America on the brink of civil war, to take the scenic route through this well-traversed era of American history.
Garfield - a young professor of classics, English literature, philosophy, natural science, American history, geography, geometry and religion at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute - bought a handbook of military science and began practicing two-man musket drills with his roommate. Abner Doubleday filled the tedious hours at besieged Fort Sumter by designing a medal he thought Congress ought to award him and his fellow soldiers holding out at the Union garrison in Charleston Harbor.
By Stephen Budiansky is the author of "Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815." May 27, 2011ĭuring the long, slow descent into war at the start of 1861, Capt.
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