1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart (English) Paperback Book

Description: 1861 by Adam Goodheart As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of its defining national drama, "1861" presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began. Goodheart takes readers from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorers wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as "exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…" by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodhearts bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations. Author Biography Adam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, and journalist. His articles have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and he is a regular columnist for The New York Timess acclaimed online Civil War series, Disunion. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington Colleges C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. Review A New York Times Notable BookPraise for Adam Goodhearts 1861 "Exhilarating. . . . Inspiring. . . . Irresistible. . . . 1861 creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine." —The New York Times Book Review"A huge contribution. . . . Hardly a page of this book lacks an insight of importance or a fact that beguiles the reader."—The Boston Globe"Adam Goodheart is a Monet with a pen instead of a paintbrush." —James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom "Goodheart writes with precision, beauty and understanding. The books will renew ones excitement about reading history." —The Albuquerque Journal "Rich, multitiered history." —The New York Review of Books "Goodheart shows us that even at 150 years distance there are new voices, and new stories, to be heard about the Civil War, and that together they can have real meaning. . . . He takes what is known, breaks it down to its elemental parts and rearranges it, giving us a different view entirely of something we thought we understood entirely." —The Boston Globe "1861 is the best book I have ever read on the start of the Civil War. . . . Penetrating, eloquent, and deeply moving, this is a classic introduction to the nations greatest conflict." —Tony Horwitz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Confederates in the Attic "Eloquent. . . . Gripping. . . . Goodheart gives readers a sense of what it was like to have been there." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Marvelous. . . . Goodheart brings us into the world of mid-nineteenth-century America, as ambiguous and ambitious and fractured as the times we live in now, and he brings to pulsing life the hearts and minds of its American citizens."—The Huffington Post "Exceptional historical reporting. . . . Enlightening, insightful, and yes, entertaining." —The Tucson Citizen "Doing what David McCulloughs 1776 did for the American Revolution, Goodhearts book delivers a remarkably original and gripping account of the year the Civil War began." —History Book Club "Goodheart is an elegant writer and this is a highly readable introduction to Americas great civil conflict." —The Seattle Times "A compelling look at the countrys dawning realization that this would be much more than a quickly resolved conflict over slavery, through the experiences of a fascinating cast of characters given short shrift (if any shrift at all) in previous Civil War books." —The Star-Ledger "Goodhearts book stands out . . . for the authors deft narrative style and vivid description. . . . [He] conjures a remarkable cast of individual Americans—from slaves and foot soldiers to the occupant of the Oval Office—using their stories to evoke a national watershed." —The Times-Picayune "An impressive accomplishment, a delightful read, and a valuable contribution that will entertain and challenge popular and professional audiences alike." —Harvard Magazine "With boundless verve, Adam Goodheart has sketched an uncommonly rich tableau of America on the cusp of the Civil War. The research is impeccable, the cast of little-known characters we are introduced to is thoroughly fascinating, the book is utterly thought-provoking, and the story is luminescent. What a triumph." —Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval Review Quote Praise for Adam Goodhearts 1861 Excerpt from Book Lower Manhattan, April 1861 It was a day unlike any the city had known before. Half a million people, or so the newspapers would report, crowded the streets between Battery Park and Fourteenth Street. If you were there among them that day, the thing that you would never forget-- not even if you lived to see the next century-- was the flags. The Stars and Stripes flew above the doors of department stores and town houses, from Bowery taverns and from the spire of Trinity Church, while Broadway, the New York Herald reported, "was almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery." P. T. Barnum, not to be outdone, especially when he sensed an opportunity for attention, had strung an entire panoply of oversize banners across the thoroughfare. The national ensign even fl uttered, in miniature, on the heads of the horses straining to pull overloaded omnibuses through the throngs on Fifth Avenue. The one flag that everyone wanted to see -- needed to see-- was in Union Square itself, the unattainable point toward which all the shoving and sweating and jostling bodies strove. No fewer than five separate speakers platforms had been hastily erected there, and every so often, above the ceaseless din, you could catch a phrase or two: "that handful of loyal men . . . their gallant commander . . . the honor of their country . . ." If you managed somehow to clamber up onto the base of a beleaguered lamppost and emerge for a moment above the hats and bonnets of the multitude, you might glimpse what was propped up on the monument in the center of the square: cradled in General Washingtons bronze arms, a torn and soot- stained flag on a splintered staff. (One hundred forty years later, in an eerie echo of that long- forgotten day, a later generation would gather around the same statue with candles and flowers in the aftermath of another attack on the nation.) Nearby, waving a bit stiffly to acknowledge the cheers, was a lean, gray-haired officer.1 But then you lost your tenuous foothold, the gray- haired officer and his flag vanished from sight, and you were down off the lamppost again, buffeted this way and that by the odorous masses of New Yorkers, ripened by exertion and by the sunny spring day: Wall Street bankers in black broadcloth; pale, flushed shopgirls; grimy men from the Fulton docks, more pungent than anyone else, smelling of fish. It was hard to imagine anybody swaggering through such a crowd, but here came someone doing just that-- and not just one man but three abreast, nonchalant young toughs all dressed in identical, baggy red shirts. One had a fat plug of tobacco in his cheek and looked ready to spit where he pleased; another fellow none too surreptitiously pinched the prettiest of the shopgirls as he passed. Somehow, by common consent, the pressing throngs parted to let them through. They all knew exactly who these superior beings were: the fire bhoys. And as of today, no longer simply that, either-- for these bhoys had signed their enlistment papers yesterday, and were very shortly to be sworn in as soldiers of the First New York Fire Zouaves. On the way home after the great Union rally, you might have seen many more of them, over a thousand red- shirted recruits, crowding a park just off Fourteenth Street, arrayed in rough military formation. Uncharacteristically quiet, even subdued, they raised their brawny right arms as their colonel, the man they had just unanimously elected to lead them into war--for such was the custom still, in those early months of 1861--administered the oath. The young colonel--he seemed, from a distance, barely more than a boy--was, unlike all his thousand-odd comrades, not a New York City fireman. He was not even a New Yorker, unless one counted his childhood far upstate. He was different in almost every way from the strapping men of his regiment, with their loose limbs and salty tongues: a small man, neat and self- contained, who never drank, or smoked, or swore. He thrilled to poetry as much as to the tattoo of drums; he had dined at the White House more often than in taverns or mess halls; and he had come not from the teeming wards of Brooklyn but from the West. He was also one of those occasional American figures whose death, even more than his life, seemed to mark the passing away of one era and the beginning of another. He would be, briefly, the wars most famous man. And for that moment, the entire conflict, the irreconcilable forces that set state against state and brother against brother, would seem distilled into--as one who knew him well would write--"the dark mystery of how Ellsworth died." Like so m any Americans of his generation, Elmer Ellsworth seemed to emerge out of nowhere. This wasnt quite true, but almost. In later years, some would swear they had roomed with him in a cheap boardinghouse in Washington, long before he was famous; or been his classmate at a high school in Kenosha before he suddenly dropped out and disappeared; or known him living up among the Ottawa Indians near Muskegon, where the tribe had adopted him as its chief. But no one was ever quite sure. Odd remnants of his diaries would eventually turn up. And his parents, at least, who would long outlive him, eventually shared everything they could recall of his boyhood. He had left home early, though. There were few enough opportunities for him there. Ellsworth was born in the year of the countrys first great financial depression, 1837, in the small village of Malta in Saratoga County, New York. His ancestors had settled nearby before the Revolution, but the family was poor. Ephraim Ellsworth, the boys father, had struggled as a tailor until the Panic ruined him, forcing him to eke out a living doing odd jobs, netting wild passenger pigeons to sell for their meat, and peddling kegs of pickled oysters door- to- door on commission. His son, serious- minded and small for his age, was sent off at the age of nine to work for a man who owned a general store and saloon. Scrupulously, the boy refused to handle liquor or even--as his master expected--to rinse out the customers whiskey glasses. In a world where drunkenness was common (among children, too), he had already resolved to be different. His early life, Ellsworth would write as an adult, seemed to him nothing but "a jumble of strange incidents." He was a child who seemed to live half in the gritty reality of his physical surroundings, half in a dream world of his own creation. Sometimes he cadged paint from a wagon shop in the village and daubed scenes onto a scrap of board or an old window shade. One of these has survived; it shows a forest- fringed river that might have been the nearby Hudson but for the turrets and spires of Arthurian castles rising along its banks. In summer, he wandered among the "green old hills" above the actual river, and in winter, he skated on the Champlain Canal, perhaps developing there the ease of movement that would later mature into a kind of balletic grace. His schooling must have been intermittent, and when he did attend, he was often teased; the other children nicknamed him "Oyster Keg," on account of both his size and his fathers ignominious occupation. The boy learned to defend his honor with his fists. Occasionally, though, the larger world offered glimpses of a reality nearly as glamorous as his painted fantasies. Malta lay astride the road to Saratoga Springs, a watering place popular with the officers and cadets of West Point, and in summer, the sprucely uniformed soldiers (with fine young women at their sides) must have passed through the village in hired carriages on their way to the nearby resort. For the watchful boy, the sight must have seemed a visitation from an imagined country. Many years later, Ellsworths aunt would recall him making forts out of loose bricks and shaping mud into breastworks; wooden blocks represented American soldiers and enemy redcoats. His grandfather, George Ellsworth, had been a teenage militiaman in the Revolution, and although Georges pension application from the 1830s reveals that he was illiterate--he signed the document with a quavering X-- it also shows that in old age he could still recount vivid tales of battling Tories and Indians along the Hudson Valley.6 Elmers grandfather died when the boy was not yet three, but the old veterans widow survived him by many years, and probably shared the stories she knew. The rocky slopes and tidy Dutch towns above the Hudson seemed themselves to tell tales of the many famous deeds they had witnessed. A boy with Ellsworths active imagination, looking out over the placid landscape of fields and pastures, must sometimes have felt as if the cannons were still booming and the tomahawks still flying in the forests, somewhere over the next line of hills. When the boy was about eleven, his family moved to Mechanicville, a larger town with its own railroad station. Peddling the New York papers through the aisles of the crowded passenger cars, he must have scanned reports of the Mexican War and its aftermath, and of the liberal, nationalist revolutions in Europe, some of them sparked by student agitators not much older th Details ISBN1400032199 Author Adam Goodheart Short Title 1861 Pages 496 Series Vintage Civil War Library Language English ISBN-10 1400032199 ISBN-13 9781400032198 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 973.711 Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-02-21 Subtitle The Civil War Awakening Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-02-21 NZ Release Date 2012-02-21 US Release Date 2012-02-21 UK Release Date 2012-02-21 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Vintage Books Illustrations WITH 15 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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