The Coming Fury (The Centennial History of the Civil War, Vol. 1)

Dust jacket notes: "In words that weave history into art, Bruce Catton has created a book about the coming of the Civil War that is at once a broad canvas and a revealing close-up. Different from anything he has written before, except in the sheer beauty of its narrative style, The Coming Fury is conceived as classic tragedy; as a series of ever-narrowing circles of choice with fewer and fewer men to make them, enclosing, finally, but two men faced with almost no choice at all. Through these pages move the men who guided - and who followed - the nation toward conflict: the extremists, the moderates, and those men, great and small, caught in between. Opening with the Democratic convention - Charleston, April, 1860 - where an almost festive atmosphere prevailed, it closes with a nation torn asunder by the first Battle of Bull Run. How did it all happen, and why? Was the conflict truly 'irrepressible'? These are the questions examined in Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury, a work informed by exhaustive scholarship, comprehensive in outlook, panoramic, yet intensely personal in expression."