The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

When war came, everyone told her it was her war, and she thought so too. In South Carolina, as the war commenced, the wife of a plantation owner wrote in her diary that naturally slavery had to go, but added, “Yes, how I envy those saintly Yankee women, in their clean cool New England homes, writing to make their fortunes and to shame us.” Harriet

The period during which Mr. Buchanan retained office, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, from November, 1860, to March, 1861, was that which enabled the seceding States of the South to complete their preparations for the Civil War,

For generations, historians argued whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or was rather a showdown between competing economic systems. More recent historiography has shown how deeply Republican antislavery was intertwined with the Whig prodevelopment project. Republicans took economic independence as a prerequisite for political freedom—