Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War

So vividly does Allegiance re-create the events leading to the firing of the first shot of the Civil War on April 12, 1861, that we can feel the fabric of the Union tearing apart. It is a tense and surprising story, filled with indecisive bureaucrats, uninformed leaders, and hotheaded local politicians who surrounded some dedicated and honorable soldiers on both sides.

The six-month-long agony that began with Lincoln's election in November sputters from one crisis to the next until Lincoln's inauguration began the march to secession. As the South gathered forces around the Union outpost, a nerve-wracking standoff finally exploded into battle as the soldiers at Fort Sumter neared starvation. At the center of this dramatic narrative is the heroic figure of Major Robert Anderson, a soldier whose experience had taught him above all that war was the poorest form of policy. With little help from Washington, he almost single-handedly forestalled the beginning of the war until he finally had no choice but to fight.

David Detzer's decade-long research on these people in this place at this time illuminates the passions that led to the fighting, the sober reflections of the man who restrained its outbreak, and the individuals on both sides who changed American history. No other historian has given us a clearer or more intimate picture of the human drama of Fort Sumter.