Days of Defiance:  Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War, by Maury Klein

When I saw that this book was written by a fellow whose body of work was previously limited to nonfiction works on railroads with a little bit of work on the industrial revolution in the late 19th century United States, I was a bit skeptical that Mr. Klein could pull off the material.  However, the combination of excellent use of sources (allowing a new look at an old problem) and novelesque prose on the level of a McCullough or Foote allow this work to merit a wide reading audience among those interested in either the military or political history of the period just before the Civil War.

What makes this book worthwhile is its focus on neglected and forgotten areas of history and its focus on unusual and important people as well as the complicated and fascinating negotiations and double games they were involved in.  There are really two compelling aspects of this book that make it a most excellent narrative history on the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the American Civil War–its characters and its plot.

Let us focus first on the people intertwined in this story.  Some of them are famous–Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, William Seward, Pierre Bauregaurd, Stephen Douglas, and Winfield Scott.  Some of them are familiar to knowledgeable readers of the Civil War, like the incestuous pederast South Carolinian James Hammond or the feisty diarist Mary Chestnut and her husband James.  Other characters are much more obscure, from Pensacola naval hero Lt. Adam Slemmer to British reporter William Russel, who has two of the most quotable lines in the entire book:  “I have never seen so many good hats and coats in any gathering of Irishmen anywhere in the world,” and his quote in his diary upon reading his remarks in the New York newspapers the next morning, “O Lord, why did I do it?” [1].  The same quote could have been said by many of the people in this book, were they the reflective sort.

The second compelling aspect of this book is its story, in that this work manages to talk about the beginning of the Civil War in a way that only a few books manage–by focusing on the tension brought about my months of useless negotiations and fruitless attempts of reconciliation to find a nonexistent middle ground.  The book is therefore a sobering reminder that sincerity of attempts to make peace are not sufficient if there is no middle ground one can reach.  This lesson not only is present in spades in this book, but is also applicable to other crises.  The fact that in such crises minor figures in far flung regions often play important roles in the absence of central authority or a coherent policy or strategy (such as Lt. Slemmer at Ft. Pickens and Major Anderson in Ft. Sumter) is another lesson that can be applied to crises outside of the Civil War.

Altogether, this book manages not only to be a sobering look at the destruction of the original American Republic in the crisis over slavery and secession but also an examination of the tensions that exist within many institutions, lessons that can be learned deeply and applied broadly.  The book is a moderately lengthy (about 430 pages of text) but excellent work in crisp, compelling prose that deserves a broad audience.  With luck the author will try his hand at other Civil War themes–he has the tools and the research to do so very well.  The book has a rather grim and melancholy feel to it that suits the mood and the material, ending with these bittersweet statements:  “When an exhausted nation awoke from the nightmare of civil war almost exactly four years later, secession was dead, slavery was dead, the world of the chivalry was dead, the old Federal Republic of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster was dead, Abraham Lincoln was dead, and upward of 620,000 Americans were dead, a number greater than the total of all the men who died in every other war the United States has fought.  But the nation and its institutions endured in a new and stronger form, to face the challenges of another day [2].”  For those reasons and others this book, and its subject, remain popular and relevant 150 years later.

[1] Maury Klein, Days of Defiance:  Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997), 12.

[2] Maury Klein, Days of Defiance:  Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997), 430.