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Bruce Catton’s centennial history of the ACW makes certain to go into some background. The opening act is the Democratic National Convention in 1860. Place: Charleston, South Carolina. Favored Candidate: Stephen Douglas.

However, there’s a wing of the party that is determined to throw the script. Among them, President Buchanan was determined the nomination should go elsewhere, and radicals like William Yancey saw a chance to force the South out of the country. In the end, the convention broke up after most of the southern delegates walked out rather than endorse a platform that did not take a very hard line on the extension of slavery. Months later, the Republican National Convention also goes off script, with a relative unknown being nominated in place of favorite Senator William Seward.

That’s the first chapter. The final one starts with McClellan’s campaign in (future West) Virginia, and then moves to the Southern armies in Virginia, and the two Union forces just north of the Potomac. Pressure is on McDowell to move south and prosecute the war, but the army isn’t really ready, and after some hours of fighting, all cohesion is lost, and the army collapses, routing en mass back to Washington DC. The Rebel army isn’t any better, and is too thoroughly disordered in victory to pursue.

In between, we have three hundred fifty pages of the drift to disunion and war. This includes the initial “feeling out” of states towards succession, followed later by the actual acts themselves. As this progresses, the various states demand various bits of federal property, located in those states, to be handed over. This mostly happens for various reasons (there just not being any federal troops to hold most of them, among others), but there are exceptions.

Fort Moultrie, guarding the Charleston harbor is nearly indefensible from land, but not entirely so, and Colonel Gardner started sweeping away built up sand and dirt from the outer walls. An attempt to recover arms from a nearby arsenal caused a furor that saw him replaced. Major Anderson was now in the same barely-tenable position. But, there was a better option; Fort Sumter, in a more central position of the harbor was just finishing construction. Anderson had been asking for instructions for some time, and eventually realized the orders he did have gave him the latitude to move out there under the circumstances.

While slow in coming, those orders came from an administration whose character was also changing. As the South left, so too did parts of Buchanan’s cabinet, leading to a more pro-Northern group, and Lincoln’s inaugural promise “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts” really starts as the previous administration starts looking for ways to resist succession. The entire crisis over Sumter gets extensive coverage, along with related topics such as Fort Pickens in Florida.

It is worth noting that the first volume of Catton’s trilogy looks at about a year, and still leaves the bulk of a four-year war to the next two volumes. For the overview it is, there’s a lot of detail about the immediate lead up. Of course, you can always reach further back, and he studiously avoids going into anything earlier than early 1860. There is precious little about the Mexican-American War, nor the political crisis caused by the Wilmot Proviso and its defeat that put the current political players into their positions. And that’s fine, there’s more than enough here to go through as it is, and it is an exciting recounting of events gathering force until the first real clash of arms wrecks two armies, and very different conclusions about the course of the war are seen.