Review: Klein, Days of Defiance (1997)

[truepenny]

Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War by Maury Klein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about the fall of Fort Sumter and therefore about the beginning of the American Civil War. Klein does a very good job of weaving together the various strands: the men in the fort who can't get a straight answer out of Washington, the white people of Charleston who are frankly drunk with rebellion, Abraham Lincoln trying to put his Cabinet together. It is not quite as sensitive as I would like to the viewpoint of the enslaved people of Charleston---we see them only through the eyes of the white Charlestonians and, while that may be a simple matter of what the historical record has left us, Klein makes little to no effort to read against the text. He is unnecessarily catty about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it's very hard to tell from here whether Mary Todd Lincoln was as awful as he makes her out to be, or if there are wheels within wheels. So I guess perhaps there's a little less nuance than would be ideal.

It's also a little uncomfortable reading a book written in 1997 that assumes that, no, of course America could never possibly do anything of the sort again, and I think about four years of Trump and the January 6th insurrection, and it's not as far away as Klein thinks it is.



View all my reviews