Mr. Chadwick, a former journalist, has achieved the effect of a living—and momentous—dialogue with history by carefully selecting quotes from dozens of participants in that fraught time and skillfully binding them together with brief commentaries. His swift, absorbing, wholly coherent narrative gives a sense of immediacy to the travails of those who thirsted for a fight, and those who groped after peace ... The quotations he arrays are rich enough to be arresting yet sufficiently brief that the reader never gets the claustrophobic feeling of being inside an anthology.
The genius of Bruce Chadwick’s oral history of the road to Ft. Sumter is that it reveals the emotions, the uncertainties, the fears, the rumors, the excitement, the hopes, the pride, the courage, and the animosities of the men and women involved in the drama that began the Civil War.
Ingeniously constructed ... Though some perspectives feel more marginal than essential, they add up to a comprehensive study of the spark that set the Civil War aflame. It’s a noteworthy feat of scholarship.
