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By Root 1859 0

descendants. But there were simply far fewer soldiers in the early months of 1861, and even those who did serve were perhaps less likely to send as many letters, since most were on three-month enlistments and believed they would soon be home to recount their experiences in person. Perhaps, too, families were less likely to preserve the soldiers’ letters than they would be later, once it became clear to everyone that the war was going to be both a long struggle and an epochal event in the nation’s history. So far, I have been able to locate only two letters from an enlisted man at Fort Sumter during the siege. There are very few surviving letters or diaries of African-Americans from this period.

General Sources

James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988) has been justly hailed as the best contemporary one-volume history of the war. I would go further and call it the best one-volume history of the conflict ever written: it is astonishing how much narrative detail, period color, subtle analysis, and topical breadth the author is able to fit into a single (admittedly thick but never ponderous) book. Older accounts continue to provide fresh insights and are written with an elegance and wit, a sense of irony and a subtle appreciation of the complex (often contradictory) nature of the past, that are too rarely found in recent scholarship. Allan Nevins’s eight-volume The Ordeal of the Union (New York: Scribner, 1947–71) remains a monument of American historiography. Bruce Catton has gone somewhat into eclipse in recent decades, but his books—especially, for the purposes of my own work, The Coming Fury (New York: Doubleday, 1961)—are inspiring examples of how an author can write history as literature without sacrificing accuracy.

Russell McClintock’s Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) is an invaluable recent addition to the historiography, meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the fall of Sumter and illustrating the relationship between Northern public opinion and the inner councils of the Lincoln administration.

The compendious collection published by the War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) is an indispensable resource for anyone studying almost any aspect of the conflict.

Michael Burlingame has done more than perhaps any other single scholar to assemble exhaustive information about Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency—in the process also casting light into many other corners of nineteenth-century America. His two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) is a true gold mine, and Burlingame has further earned the gratitude of researchers and readers by posting an unabridged version of the already almost two-thousand-page biography (including his full footnotes) on the website of Knox College’s Lincoln Studies Center.

Philip Paludan’s A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) is a revealing account of how the Civil War transformed the identity and society of the North. Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff’s A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2007) lucidly portrays the various roles of ordinary American men and women. George M. Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) remains one of the most thoughtful and subtle treatments of American intellectual life in the Civil War era, and of the complicated relationships among poetry, philosophy, and politics.

Prologue: A Banner at Daybreak

Two of the Union officers besieged at Fort Sumter during the winter of 1860–61 left vivid accounts of their experience. Samuel Wylie Crawford’s The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter (New York: C. L. Webster & Co, 1887) not only recounts the events in Charleston