Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861

By Nelson D. Lankford
Illustrated, maps, endnotes, bibliography, index, 308 pp., 2007. Viking-Penguin Group, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014, $27.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: David F. Riggs
David F. Riggs is a museum curator at Colonial National Historical Park, Yorktown. He has a BA in history from Lock Haven University and MA in history from Penn State. His publications include Embattled Shrine: Jamestown in the Civil War and Vicksburg Battlefield Monuments.

Review:
Secession of the Southern states is a familiar story. Beginning with South Carolina in December 1860, seven states in the Deep South seceded within six weeks.

While the Confederacy formed its government, Americans were nervous spectators until the firing on Fort Sumter and Abraham Lincoln's call for 75,000 militia, which prompted four of the eight remaining slaveholding states to secede. Then the fighting began.

Not exactly. With hindsight, this is the way it appears. But the first several months of 1861 were a tingling mixture of uncertainty, suspense, intrigue, and, for many citizens, a sanguine hope that this, like previous sectional crises, would be resolved by compromise.

Nelson D. Lankford has written the ultimate narrative. A Civil War author who also displays his skills as editor of publications for the Virginia Historical Society, he masterfully integrates primary sources and transports the reader through a literary time machine that captures the mood of the country.

His focus is upon Virginia and Maryland, which flanked Washington, D.C., and made opposite decisions that influenced the outcome in the remaining border states.

After two months of heated debate between contesting factions in Richmond, Lincoln's call to arms immediately tipped the scales toward secession in Virginia.

Baltimore quickly reacted to these actions by Lincoln and Virginia. When a mob attacked federal troops en route to the nation's capital, ardent secession-ists nearly compelled Maryland to follow the Old Dominion's example.

A reader can easily become absorbed in this tale of the spring of 1861. The brilliance of Dr. Lankford's book is that he makes history live as few writers do.

An example is Lincoln's inaugural. We, like contemporaries, analyze the speech for its message to an anxious nation. But we've forgotten the mood in Washington, where security measures were akin to "post-9/11." Virginia's capture of Harpers Ferry, the Union's evacuation of Gosport Navy Yard, the response to the Baltimore riot - these events and their consequences likewise are described vividly.

Analysis is astute and subtly intertwined so as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative. The book's concluding chapter neatly places everything in perspective.

This well-researched book is scintillating. As the author ably contends, neither war nor secession of the border states was inevitable. v For a greater appreciation of two pivotal states and their prewar influence, this volume is a joy to read.