#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal
five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this
'riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult' ( Los Angeles Times ). On November 6 1860
Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly
at odds Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union with one state
after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fuelled the conflict but
somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in
Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the
chaotic months between Lincoln's election and the Confederacy's shelling of Sumter - a period
marked by tragic errors and miscommunications enflamed egos and craven ambitions personal
tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were 'so
great that could I have anticipated them I would not have believed it possible to survive
them'. At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson Sumter's
commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union Edmund
Ruffin a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardour at every opportunity and
Mary Boykin Chesnut wife of a prominent planter conflicted over both marriage and slavery and
seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln battling
with his duplicitous Secretary of State William Seward as he tries desperately to avert a war
that he fears is inevitable - one that will eventually kill 750 000 Americans. Drawing on
diaries secret communiques slave ledgers and plantation records Larson gives us a political
horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink - a dark reminder that we
often don't see a cataclysm coming until it's too late.
