From Lincoln's election to secession from the Union, this compelling history explains how South Carolina was swept into a cultural crisis at the heart of the Civil War. In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming,...

Daniel Crofts examines Unionists in three pivotal southern states--Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee--and shows why the outbreak of the war enabled the Confederacy to gain the allegiance of these essential, if ambivalent, governments.

The result of painstaking and detailed research, Ralph A. Wooster, offers a fascinating insight into the men that participated in the conventions, and Legislatures that led the abortive rebellion of the Southern states. Delving into their professions, backgrounds, land and slave holding, the author elucidates the trends, voting records and party politics of the members. A fascinating and necessary study on the proponents of the Confederate cause....

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies...