Sources and Acknowledgments

WHENEVER I SEARCH FOR A BOOK IDEA, I LOOK FIRST FOR A SUBJECT that is inherently suspenseful and lends itself to being told as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I think of this central arc as a narrative spine, a Christmas tree; the fun part is finding and hanging the shiny ornaments, the revealing details hidden deep within archives, diaries, and memoirs. The search for these invariably becomes a journey full of unexpected surprises and revelations no matter how much a subject has been studied before—because every writer in every time brings to the field a unique lens through which to view the world, formed by his personal experiences and the character of his era.

I began working on this book in early 2020 during the first weeks of the COVID pandemic, when, between spraying groceries with Clorox and hunting for true N-95 masks, I started reading about Fort Sumter and the advent of the Civil War. Political unrest had heightened the chaos of the pandemic, and for whatever reason I began wondering, Exactly how did the Civil War begin? What really happened at Fort Sumter? My usual approach would have been to parachute immediately into some rich archive, like the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, but the pandemic had limited the accessibility of this and many other archives, and made travel problematic. While aimlessly wandering through various online repositories, I came across a collection of documents entitled The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies and learned that I could acquire a bound copy for a bargain price. The book arrived, and I was enthralled. Here, in meticulous chronological order, were hundreds of letters, telegrams, and reports that captured in vivid detail the ticktock of America’s march toward fratricide. There it was: my narrative spine.

Once the pandemic eased, I was at last able to visit Charleston, where I toured the fort and spent many happy hours in the reading room of the Charleston Historical Society. It is one thing to read about slavery in textbooks; it’s quite another to open a file and find a list of enslaved Blacks—identified by name—who occupied a particular plantation; and to see flyers advertising slave auctions; and bank documents in which men, women, and children served as collateral for mortgages. At length the Library of Congress eased its pandemic rules and I was able to examine the papers of Maj. Robert Anderson, James Henry Hammond, Asst. Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, and others.

The Library also holds The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, and has curated these online in brilliant fashion. Another digital archive, the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, also proved exceptionally useful. Published by the Abraham Lincoln Association, this collection presents key documents from Lincoln’s papers in chronological order, laced with invaluable contextual notations. The digital incarnations of both collections are a wonder; and, hallelujah, they’re searchable. Before starting my journey, I had known little about Lincoln beyond what I’d learned through casual reading, but I quickly gained an appreciation of the sheer substance of the man, especially his warmth and sense of humor.

A number of secondary sources formed my core library: Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson; Lincoln by David Herbert Donald; Lincoln on the Verge, Ted Widmer; Lincoln: President-Elect, Harold Holzer; Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin; Crisis of Fear, Steven A. Channing; and the virtuosic Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant by William W. Freehling. One work that proved particularly valuable was Drew Gilpin Faust’s James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, full of intimate details about a man who helped shape Southern attitudes toward slavery and the North. The bible on Fort Sumter remains W. A. Swanberg’s First Blood, published in 1957.

A particularly useful, if quirky, work is Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, Volume III, which lists in almost stenographic sequence the seminal events that occurred in Lincoln’s life every day from January 1, 1861, to his death on April 15, 1865. (He was shot the night before.) The chronology ends with a particularly poignant entry. “Dr. Charles S. Taft at bedside records his observations: President stops breathing ‘at 7:21 and 55 seconds in the morning of April 15th, and 7:22 and 10 seconds his pulse ceased to beat.’”

I never expected that a British war correspondent named William Howard Russell would prove to be a hugely valuable source, but he did, in part for his vivid firsthand descriptions of key individuals like William Seward and Lincoln, and for revealing an aspect of antebellum America that gets left out of most Civil War accounts: the prevalence of chewing tobacco and its residues. I was struck also by the candor with which certain nineteenth-century actors described their digestive travails, like James Henry Hammond’s descriptions of his lifelong battle with what he called dyspepsia, and Gen. Winfield Scott’s crippling bouts of intestinal unrest.

Nor did I know much about Mary Boykin Chesnut, an acute observer of her time, whose lacerating quips took me by surprise. She began keeping a diary with an eye to eventually publishing an expanded, more novelistic version for the public, but a heart attack intervened, taking her life on November 22, 1886, when she was sixty-three. The first published iteration came out twenty years later, called A Diary from Dixie, edited by Isabella D. Martin, who, alas, excised much of the original diary out of a concern that it was simply too personal to be published. The best version by far is Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, published in 1981. Edited and richly annotated by the great C. Vann Woodward, it is 833 pages long, more than three times the length of the original “private” diary, which Woodward co-edited with Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, and published under the title The Private Mary Chesnut. How refreshing to find such observations as Mary’s description of Richmond: “What a place this is; how every one hates each other.” Or this, regarding a female contemporary: “What a little miscreant.”

THIS BOOK COULD NOT have emerged without the enthusiastic help of a legion of loyal and enthusiastic allies.

As always I owe big thanks to my wife, Chris, for her careful reading of my initial draft and her invaluable margin notes, consisting mainly of smiley faces, sad faces, and long lines of zzzzzzz’s. Incalculable thanks go to my editor, the brilliant and wise—and patient—Amanda Cook, who dropped everything to turn my abysmal first draft into the story I’d hoped for, in the process paring forty thousand words, none of which will ever be missed.

Assistant editor Katie Berry wrestled the manuscript into its final shape and would not tolerate my whimpering about needing to go through it just one more time. My agent, David Black, longtime friend and forever mensch, provided endless encouragement and some really terrific dinners as I struggled through various trials of the soul. Huge thanks as well to Julie Tate, ace fact-check ranger, for once again saving me from mortal ridicule. Thanks to Penny Simon, my friend and longtime publicist, who keeps me in line and does an incredible job of arranging book tours and winning the attention of reviewers and bookstores alike. Eliza Fischer at the always classy Steven Barclay Agency helped keep me from succumbing to introversion by setting up speaking events around the country. And special thanks to Carrie Dolan, friend and fellow cocktail enthusiast, who read the final iteration and realized that now, at last, she possessed a truly effective doorstop.

Once again the folks at Crown Publishing made birthing this book about as painless as could be. Julie Cepler, director of marketing, launched it boldly onto the digital sea, and, with Lorissa Shepstone, web designer, burnished my digital presence until it gleamed. Ruth Liebmann did likewise in the brick-and-mortar world of bookseller conferences while also treating me to one of the best meals I’ve had anywhere, at Selden Standard in Detroit. Mark Birkey, associate director of production editorial (yes, that is indeed his title), turned Demon into a physical, readable thing, deploying Caroline Clouse to polish my prose and fix my inept spellings (the only trait I share with Lincoln), and Barb Jatkola to do the same with my endnotes and bibliography. Barbara Bachman once again marshaled her palette of type styles and fonts to create a clean and crisp interior design. Anna Kochman, associate director of design, dressed it up in a killer jacket. Bree Martinez, senior publicist, helped introduce the book to the world and get it into the hands of the people who matter most, its readers.

Special thanks to my daughters, who, along with my wife, helped keep me grounded while also tolerating my “dad alerts” reminding them to get their flu shots, avoid angry otters, and never fly in small private aircraft. A special shout, too, to grand-dog Rocco, the one-eyed Tibetan terrier whose panda Halloween costume helped distract me from the final deadline crush, and to his nemesis, Clocko, the cat.

In the following pages I identify the sources of quotations and odd-seeming facts, and material that appeared in the works of other writers. I do not cite everything, however. My collection of notes is long enough as it is. I have salted them with stories that for various reasons did not fit into the main narrative but, like little birds in a nest, seemed to cry out to be told.