Sprinkled among the more familiar events-such as Elmer Ellsworth’s fatal venture into Alexandria or the capture of Camp Jackson by Nathaniel Lyon-are numerous tidbits styled “fun facts” by one of my better high school instructors. There is much to commend this approach, not the least being the introduction of new material that even seasoned students will find enlightening. Rather, 1861 spans the calendar’s spectrum from the Wide-Awake movement of the presidential election, to the firing on Fort Sumter, to the composition of Abraham Lincoln’s message to Congress in July. Goodheart almost proudly proclaims that his book “is not a Civil War saga of hallowed battlefields drenched in blood, much less of which general’s cavalry came charging over which hill” (22), the kind of history that treats the war like “a great military Super Bowl contest between Blue and Gray heroes” (16). When chapters begin like this, readers draw closer to the fire, grip the bindings a bit more firmly, and settle in for a delicious journey into the past. Tidewater Virginia, for example, “a place freighted with the heavy past as anywhere in the still young country” was, in Goodheart’s prose “a place of Indian bones and deep-cellared manor houses and the armor of King James’s men rusting beneath the dark soil” (295). Similarly, the author’s ability to place us in the locations where his stories unfold lends rare immediacy to his writing.

(Nevertheless, it is regrettable that the publisher opted to omit illustrations beyond generic images that introduce each chapter.) Butler-“of almost animal like stupidity”-with the admission that his eyes “glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh, like dark little jewels in a nest of tissue paper” (299), Goodheart adds a third dimension to his dramatis personae like the pop-up cutouts in a children’s book. Crittenden’s visage to “a death’s-head on a slate gravestone” (67) or balancing the universally lamented face of Benjamin F. His descriptions of people and places are transformative. No one can emerge from Goodheart’s work with anything less than admiration for his writing. Ironically in so doing, Goodheart gives us a starkly imbalanced snapshot of his subject that will enthrall some readers and leave others frustrated. Goodheart links his episodic narrative with a sharp perspective and an explicit agenda that follow the tradition of those scholars, acknowledged in the introduction to his bibliography, who have “correct past imbalances” (445). $28.85.Īdam Goodheart’s much heralded 1861: The Civil War Awakening is an eloquent, innovative, and deeply researched collection of chapter-length vignettes that surveys a variety of events at the outset of our national bloodletting. 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart.

1861 by adam goodheart