A Series of “What Ifs”

 

Review of Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 by Nelson D. Lankford. (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2008): 308 pages.

.......the real value of the book is in the sober presentation of the fact that there were indeed other alternatives to war, a suggestion that caused the establishment media to collectively lose its mind when presented by President Donald Trump recently. This book provides absolute proof that their narrative is false. For that reason alone I highly recommend it.

Few people, whether northerners or Southerners know the details and decision making processes that led to Abraham Lincoln’s attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter and thus the Confederate decision to fire on the fort to prevent that aggression. Even fewer know the intimate details of how and why Abraham Lincoln decided to use that event as the occasion to call forth 75,000 militia to “suppress the rebellion and enforce the laws of the union” or how that decision dramatically affected the debates in the secession conventions in the States of the Upper South, especially Virginia and Maryland. Cry Havoc! recounts these details. Lankford’s main thesis is that the war was a tragedy of epic proportions that could have been avoided. He writes:

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