The Outbreak Of The Civil War: A Nation Tears Apart, by Heather Lehr Wagner

Given the wide readership of books about the Civil War, writing a book like this seems like a particularly low-hanging fruit as far as a writing project goes. It is not as if this sort of book even aspires to say something new about the Civil War, but this book is still a competent book about the start of the Civil War that is mostly accurate in what it says and is precisely the sort of book that is both quick to read and suitable as a book for a preteen or teen reader who is interested in history and wants some material that is not too overwhelming in size. This book fits the bill as the sort of book that one would expect to find in an elementary or middle school library for ambitious students of history in the United States, and if it is not particularly original in what it says, it says what it has to say mostly well and deals with a period of history that is deeply interesting to many people (myself included), and that is the beginning of the American Civil War.

This book is about 100 pages long and is divided into nine chapters. The book begins with a chapter on Jefferson Davis, the first (and only) president of the Confederate States of America, and discusses how when secession came he wanted and expected to serve as one of its leading generals but instead found himself chosen as the president of the slaveowning republic (1). This is followed, naturally, by a chapter on how slavery shaped the struggle between the Union and the Confederacy (2). While it is not true that slavery was the only cause of the American Civil War, all of the various causes of the war found themselves somehow affected and influenced by the debate over slavery and its rightness or wrongness. This is followed by a chapter that discusses how laws deepened the divide, and how it became impossible to deal with the ordinary Congressional business of organizing territories or encouraging the development of empty spaces in the United States or dealing with the protection of people against kidnappers without dealing in some fashion with the slavery debate (3). A chapter discusses John Brown’s raid, an important catalyst in increasing the sectional tensions as the 1860 election approached (4). This is followed by a discussion of party politics, including the breakup of the Democratic party, that made it seemingly inevitable that the Republican party would win (5). The Republican standard-bearer in 1860 was, of course, the incomparable Abraham Lincoln, who receives a brief chapter of his own in the book (6). The author then discusses the secession winter (7) that led seven states to rebel against the United States in the months between the election of 1860 and Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861. This is followed by a chapter on the events at Fort Sumter (8) in Charleston harbor that led to the outbreak of the Civil War (9). The book then ends with a chronology and timeline, notes, a bibliography, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

The biggest misstep that the author makes is her assertion that after the moves of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas to secede from the United States that the United States ceased to exist. This is, admittedly, the subject of intense historical debate. The United States did not, in fact, change its form of government during or after the Civil War, and though the Civil War marks a decisive (and not entirely beneficial) change in the relationship between the Union and its constituent states, it does not mark the difference between one republic and another in the way that the various changes of government and constitutions in France have made for five republics in the time that the United States has (so far) endured under one. It would have been fair to say that the internal peace of the Republic had been shattered, but the Union still held, regardless of what was done by the states of the Deep South. The forcible conquest of the Confederacy, in fact, demonstrates that the Union still survived, and retained its power, despite the crisis of Civil War, though that is the subject for another book.