Finishing a Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, which focuses very specifically on the period of the last few months of the James Buchanan Administration through the inauguration of Lincoln and the eventual shelling of Ft. Sumter.
It focuses much more on Charleston, South Carolina and the South Carolina political establishment, with detail provided on characters like Edward Ruffin as well. My key takeaway:
1) The dithering and corruption in the James Buchanan administration is really reinforced by this book. The corruption of Buchanan's Secretary of War John B. Floyd was something. I had never head of the Indian Bond affair but he basically stole huge sums of money from the Indian Trust to prop up his business crony. He also attempted to flood teetering federal facilities in the south with weapons and supplies so they could be seized by the Confederacy. US Grant, in his memoirs, called him a traitor that intentionally positioned the U.S. Army to be captured quickly in the event of war.
2) The personal grandstanding and poor forecasting by Lincoln's first cabinet, especially William Seward, who kept promising unofficially to Confederate emissaries via channels that Ft. Sumter was to be surrendered. Many argued that Unionist loyaly ran high in the South and just waiting would entice back secessionist states.
3) The role of "personal honor" in so much of the South's decisions. So much of their correspondence focuses on their honor being impinged.
4) Just how much Europeans still looked down on Americans at that point as uncouth, backwards, and undignified. There is a hilarious passage describing how the various British War Correspondents did not know how to handle the tobacco spit that was everywhere. They also *****ed about train travel being terrible and the Willard Hotel being a vulgar place of scheming and backstabbing.
Good read and worth checking out.
