The period between the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 is one of the most heavily covered in American history.  Those five months represent a decisive turning point that led to the bloodiest war that the nation ever fought, followed by the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction.  Yet as Russell McClintock notes in the introduction to this book, most of the attention on this period has focused on the attitudes and developments in the South.  By contrast, the events and decisions made in the North have received little attention, with Kenneth M. Stampp’s dated And The War Came dominating the short list of works focused on the secession crisis as it developed there.  McClintock’s book is an effort to redress this by showing how the North reacted to the secession movement and how the decisions they made ultimately led to war.

To do this McClintock focuses on politicians and public opinion in four geographic areas: Washington, D.C., and the states of Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts.  These areas open up a range of reactions to Southern declarations, as well as proposals for how to respond.  He finds that while determination to maintain the Union was widespread, opinions as to how to do this varied widely, with many people supporting some sort of compromise.  These attitudes were strongest in the nation’s capital, where Northern politicians had to address the concerns of Southern unionists working to maintain as many Southern states in the Union as they could.  Yet there was a real vacuum of leadership in these months, with James Buchanan hobbled by a narrow view of his range of action as president and Abraham Lincoln endeavoring to keep his fragile political party together on the cusp of taking power.  In the end, the range of options steadily narrowed, to the point that by April Lincoln faced the choice of resupplying the remaining outposts in federal hands or abandoning them in a further effort at conciliation.  His decision to resupply the forts, and the Southern attack on them, helped to erase temporarily the divisions over secession, uniting the North against Southern disunion and bringing about war.

McClintock’s book is a fine study of how the North reacted to secession.  It is primarily a study of the political response, which is understandable given the extent to which secession in those months was predominantly a political issue.  His depiction of the major political actors is often surprising, with the moderate Lincoln steadfastly opposed to key concessions and the supposedly hardline William H. Seward at the forefront of compromise.  Yet the book suffers somewhat from the author’s focus on the controversy over Fort Sumter, which predominates here to the extent of overshadowing events elsewhere in the South that were contributing to the crisis.  This is a minor issue, though, and one that does not detract from McClintock’s overall achievement in providing readers with an examination of an often overlooked aspect of the secession crisis.

The question of what the Civil War was fought over is both one of the most innocuous and the most divisive question in American history.  The answer expressed to that question – slavery or states rights – can speak more to the respondent’s ancestry, background, and ideological beliefs than to their understanding of history.  Few appreciate this better than Charles Dew.  A self-professed “son of the South”, he grew up amid the assertions that South seceded over state’s rights.  Yet as his book demonstrates, the issue that agitated secessionists and motivated them to leave the union was slavery, clear and simple.

To demonstrate this, Dew turns to a previously unutilized source: the speeches made by “secession commissioners” sent out by Southern state legislatures to convince their neighbors to join them in leaving the union.  Mississippi and Alabama were the first, sending ambassadors of agitation to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina even before their own convention had met.  Soon delegates crisscrossed the region, hoping to persuade as many of the slave states as they could.  As Dew demonstrates, in speech after speech, the argument they resorted to was the threat Abraham Lincoln’s election posed to the institution of slavery.  Repeatedly they argued that Lincoln’s election would unleash a vanguard of “Black Republican” activists who would create a race war or mass miscegenation.  Such statements clearly identify the cause around which Southern states rallied to defend, with the issue of “states rights” only emerging after the war with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery accomplished.

Dew’s slim book is a powerful rebuttal to those who would deny that slavery was the defining issue of secession.  Yet while Dew does an excellent job of analyzing the arguments of the commissioners,  his narrow focus on the speeches themselves leaves a few questions unanswered.  Nowhere, for example, does he explore their composition – whether the speeches were based on a common set of talking points, for example, or if each commissioner was left to his own devices in writing them.  The impact of the speeches on the secession debates is also left unexamined, leaving the reader with no idea whether the speakers’ arguments were ignored or whether they influenced the debate and were taken up by others in advocating disunion.  Nevertheless, in his stated goal Dew makes a convincing and well-supported argument.  His book is a persuasive addition to the debate, one that is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand secession and the causes of the Civil War for themselves.

George Brinton McClellan ranks as the most controversial general of the Civil War. Beloved by the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, his command of the Union’s premier army during the early years of the conflict generated a storm of criticism and sparked debates still being waged by historians today. McClellan himself was an early participant in these debates, seeking to affix the blame for these failures where he felt it was most deserved – namely on everybody but himself.

In this debate Stephen Sears comes down firmly in the camp of McClellan’s critics. His biography of the general provides a damming assessment of “Little Mac”’s failings, one more starkly illustrated by contrasting them with McClellan’s many gifts. Ranked second in his class at West Point, McClellan was a rising star in the antebellum United States Army before leaving for a lucrative career as a railroad executive. Yet even early on his outsized self-regard generated disputes with his superiors, as he saw what was often reasonable arguments as the product of implacable opponents determined to destroy him.

These tendencies were only magnified by the pressures of war. McClellan’s prewar reputation as a military thinker and early success in the west led to his appointment of the Army of the Potomac at the age of only 35. McClellan set out to build up a formidable fighting force, and Sears acknowledges his strengths here as a military administrator. Yet McClellan’s arrogance and reluctance to commit the army prematurely soon fueled a mounting criticism of his inactivity. McClellan’s own forays into politics (where he won more battles then he ever would as military commander) only exacerbated this, leading to charges that the general secretly harbored Confederate sympathies.

Had McClellan enjoyed success on the battlefield nothing would have come of this. His Peninsula campaign, however, was hobbled by McClellan’s insistence on a deliberate pace and a perennial (and unfounded) fear that he faced an enemy superior in numbers. As a result, despite possessing the most formidable army the nation had ever assembled he was outfoxed and outfought by his Confederate opponents; in this sense the “Young Napoleon” subtitle of this book is ironic rather than accurate. John Pope’s defeat at Second Bull Run gave McClellan a chance at redemption and the famous “Lost Orders” a priceless opportunity to defeat Robert E. Lee, yet Sears’s assessment of McClellan’s failure to take advantage of this is hard to deny. Though Lee withdrew to Virginia after the bloody battle of Antietam, McClellan’s failure to follow up on this success led to his final dismissal as army commander. It was a testament to his stature that he soon emerged as a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1864, but the party’s “peace platform” deprived him of what Sears regards as a legitimate chance of defeating Lincoln that year, leaving McClellan to enjoy a prosperous and successful – if anticlimactic – postwar career as a businessman and a politician before his early death at the age of 58.

Drawing heavily on McClellan’s letters and other documents, Sears offers a convincing assessment of McClellan and his military career.  As one might expect, the main focus is on his Civil War service, as Sears spends only four of the book’s seventeen chapters on McClellan life before and after the conflict that defined his historical legacy. The portrait that emerges is of a man who, for all of his ability was in the end brought down by his own pettiness as much as his other failings.  It makes for a sad tale of a man to whom the nation once looked as their savior, yet who ultimately squandered the goodwill earned by his promise on recriminations over failures that were squarely his own.