If we could only separate,Ī ‘separation à l’agréable,’ as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.”Ĭhesnut was not the only American to whom such comparisons occurred during the early months of 1861. “We are divorced because we have hated each other so. “We separated North and South because of incompatibility of temper,” the South Carolina diarist wrote in March 1861. As she surveyed the Union (uppercase) splittingĪpart, with North and South hurling bitter recriminations at each other, they reminded her of nothing so much as a long-married, long-quarreling husband and wife whose union (lowercase) had finally gone asunder. The end of a marriage: it seemed an almost perfect metaphor to the worldly Mary Boykin Chesnut.

That moment when just everything changed, when things that had been certainties the day before suddenly evaporated into thin air, was something I think we have a new appreciation of in our times.Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. I came to the Civil War very much informed by my experience with 9/11: being here in Washington and seeing mobs of people fleeing from the area of the White House, and people standing on the street corners looking at the column of smoke rising from the burning Pentagon. It’s famously been compared to the Iliad and the Odyssey, in that there’s a new way to narrate it in each generation. But I feel like the Civil War is one of those great stories that can just keep being visited and revisited. Goodheart: Another figure is that there have been more Civil War books published than there were soldiers at the battle of Bull Run. Slate: I recently heard Yale Professor David Blight say that there have been more books published on the Civil War than there have been days since the Civil War ended-more than 70,000 of them. But it’s also this moment right at the beginning of the war when you see him stepping into his own for the first time and making a couple of political masterstrokes that bespoke the kind of leader he would become. We tend to look at Lincoln now from the perspective of this fully realized figure who was martyred four years later, but Lincoln in 1861 was very much groping his way and in many instances blundering his way through this crisis.

Most people thought it was going to be William Seward. Everyone was speculating on what he would do, and nobody thought that Lincoln would be the preeminent power in the White House. He was a one-term Congressman from Illinois, and hadn’t even set foot in Washington in a dozen years when he came to the White House. Goodheart: Lincoln was the least known figure ever to assume the presidency until then, and I think we forget just how inexperienced he was. Slate: What’s the 1861 sense of who Abraham Lincoln is? How much do Americans know about him at the start of the war?

1861 by adam goodheart