“Not that I gave a two-cent dam for that, you understand, and still don’t. They could have kept their idiotic Civil War for me, for (my own skin’s safety apart) it was the foulest, most useless conflict in history, the mass suicide of the flower of the British-American race --- and for what? Black freedom, which would have come in a few years anyway, as sure as sunrise. And all of those boys could have been sitting in the twilight…”

Those are the words of Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., brought to us by George MacDonald Fraser. He is, of course, finely equipped to judge, having fought on both sides…or so we are told. (The section of the famed Flashman Papers covering the bulk of his Civil War service has yet to be recovered.)

1861: THE LOST PEACE is the story of how the regional conflict over slavery resulted in war…or, at any rate, the last few years of relative peace before the newly installed Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

"Winik --- quite correctly, I think --- focuses on the various personalities involved in the process, some of whom are familiar, while others are not. 1861: THE LOST PEACE is a dramatic and well-told depiction of the journey towards civil war."

The more-or-less official story of the period before the war is that the politicians of that era belonged to a “bumbling generation,” which could not hammer out a stable and lasting peace. (I am not officially disagreeing with that, but it’s an epithet that could be applied to most generations in Congress. There’s nothing more or less bumbling about the current troupe on the Potomac.)

The best argument for the bumbling nature of the politics of the time is that much of it centered on the issue of slavery in the Midwest, to the extent that there was slavery in the Midwest. Slavery was discontinued in the Northeast, in part because it was no longer economically viable, as it was in the South. But in the Midwest, slavery made even less economic sense, and few slaves were ever brought there. Although Kansas made very little sense as a slave state economically, its two votes in the Senate as a slave state were politically decisive.

Jay Winik focuses on the two triggers of secession: the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry (detailed in the Fraser book quoted above, FLASHMAN AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD) and the ascension and election of Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Even though it failed, the Brown raid represented a military threat to the slave power. The Lincoln election presaged a political threat to the slave power, which was more potent because it suddenly had become real.

The question of whether or not the Union would stay together was not, strictly speaking, legal, but emotional and psychological. Winik details the two main attempts to forestall war: the Crittenden Compromise and the subsequent Washington Peace Conference. For all its faults, the “bumbling generation” had kept the peace from the 1820s going forward, and it was thought by many that Crittenden might be able to forestall conflict.

The difficulty with any sort of compromise is that you have to be able to identify what you are willing to give up. Both the Crittenden process and the Peace Conference began with the promise that peace was possible, but it soon became clear that it could only be a reality if the Northern states agreed to permanently fix slavery within the Constitution. Whether this approach might have worked if it had been tried (it would have been time-consuming and might have let cooler heads prevail, if nothing else) is dubious at best. It was Confederate unwillingness to accept any bargain short of abject surrender that caused the peace attempts to fail.

Winik --- quite correctly, I think --- focuses on the various personalities involved in the process, some of whom are familiar, while others are not. 1861: THE LOST PEACE is a dramatic and well-told depiction of the journey towards civil war. At the end of his dramatic First Inaugural Address, Lincoln chastened the South: “[T]here still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.” The South, and the Almighty, had other plans.