Had never read a Catton book until I picked up this one recently. It's a wonderful primer, or refresher, on the causes of the Civil War and the unrelenting rush of events, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, that led to Fort Sumter and other early battles. Catton's style may be a bit ornate for today's taste, but the narrative, with its plethora of details, brings past and present into focus. The political issues of today, including civil rights, are clarified by this pre-Civil War history. The personalities of the past, both famous and obscure, are brought to bear on the issues and illuminate where we are today, stuck in a morass that our forebears tried with blood and toil to extricate themselves from. (As we know, the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War was ended prematurely, by political compromise, and the reconciliation that events demanded was never achieved.)

4.5 stars, if I could give half-stars.

Okay, so I have to admit: I never liked history very much. Growing up, it was always one of my least favorite subjects in school. But last year a friend of mine recommended the Yale Open Course class on the Civil War taught by David Blight. I gave it a go and found myself really interested in this part of history that I had always overlooked. Blight gives a shout-out to Catton in one of the lectures, and that's what led me to The Coming Fury, the first in a three-volume set that commemorated the centennial of the Civil War.

Catton was a journalist and not a historian, so he doesn't get too bogged down with dates and facts. Instead, he's more of a storyteller. I like his narrative approach. A very well-written account, and ambitious, too -- this first volume alone is about 500 pages. My half-star deduction is for sections of actual fighting that tend to lose me. Honestly, the war part of the Civil War is the most boring part to me.

Not just a pre-eminent historian of the Civil War, Catton is a great story teller - maybe the best of the long list of Civil War authors. Here he begins his Civil War trilogy where few others do - in 1860 as the political parties nominate their candidates for president and commit the nation to secession and war. Catton doesn't have to take us back through the decades to the territorial compromises or the many failures of man and government that brought the U.S. to Fort Sumter and Bull Run. Instead he introduces Civil War through the politicians who accidentally and deliberately led the nation to catastrophe in only a year so. It's brilliant. And I can't wait for volume two.
HH

Because Catton was for many years a reporter before he came to writing about the Civil War, his sentences and paragraphs are for the most part simple and clean. Unlike more than a few latter day Civil War historians, Catton seems less interested in scoring political points or offering some obscure social/political principles than he does in just telling a good story.

The Coming Fury is the first of an excellent three-volume work, all of which, in my opinion, are superior to Shelby Foote's magisterial three-volume series, which sometimes gets bogged down in convoluted, if nevertheless elegant, passages.

Unlike most books on the Civil War, this begins with the presidential conventions of 1860 and sets the political scene for the terrible war to come. We all know about the battles of the war but this explains the legal maneuvers behind the scenes.

The author uses an extensive list of sources. Along with the hard news items, he weaves in personal diary entries and letters to let the reader know the thoughts and fears of the people caught up in the events.

There are a few areas that get a bit long winded and thus it only gets 4 out of 5 stars.

One of the all-time classics of Civil War history! Catton was a master of the language and wrote with an eloquence not often found in such texts. This is the first of his trilogy in the Centennial History, and I cannot remember how many times I've read it since it was published in 1961. Each time, however, it's fresh and like being introduced to the 1860s all over again. He begins with the campaign of 1860 and ends this first volume with the tragicomic debacle of First Manassas/Bull Run, bringing to life the people and the era.

It's been over half a century since this was published, and I'm sure more modern works will correct errors which might be in this text, due to lack of access to materials, or just not have digested fifty years of additional scholarship, however, the work, in it's most essential parts, is solid and enduring. Having read this, and other similar works, I'm still stunned by those who try to deny the essential role of the question of slavery in the origins of the Civil War. This book covers only up to Bull Run, and there is a great deal more to come. It is interesting to read during the time of Pandemic, and political strife, to see themes still with us more than 150 years later. I think that's the power of a good work of History, is to recognize that ignorance, selfishness, bigotry, are not just things of the past, and very smart people during their time, can seem like such fools in hindsight. I have done reenactments, but never of the Civil War, it never seemed heroic to me to fling massed lines of troops at cannons, and rifles, only to win by being able to endure the slaughter better than your opponent. Yet, this remains an important part of our history. I do recommend.

Bruce Catton is a superb writer. The narrative style that he employs in this book brings to life the significant people and events in the 16 months from the political party conventions in April of 1860 (when Abraham Lincoln became the nominee of the Republican Party) through the first real battle of the Civil War, Bull Run/Manassas, in July of 1861. I'd always heard that Lincoln's election was the immediate precipitant of the war, but I wanted to know why, exactly. Through his extensive research, using hundreds of contemporary accounts both personal and academic, Catton brings the reader into the rooms, the fort, and the battlefield where the events of those months that shaped the course of the United States occurred. I'm looking forward to reading the next two books, Terrible Swift Sword and Never Call Retreat, of his Civil War trilogy.

Excellent as always.

Catton never disappointed. Factual and detailed, he always tells an exciting human story as viewed from a Union perspective, but never hides the faults or brutality of an ugly and brutal war.

The public is dying to know: if you were to write a comprehensive history of the US civil war, where would you begin.

Shelby Foote begins his 3000 page history with Davis and Lincoln thinking about their relative positions at the start of things. Bruce Catton begins this trilogy of history written and published around the same time as Foote's with the dueling conventions leading up to the 1860 presidential race. I like this approach because it more squarely deal with the question of what context do we need to understand where we're going. For us, we need to know the politics of the 1850s, at least in some detail, to know what matters of consequence we're happening. It also helps to place certain choices within the context of choices. For a lot of histories, we begin with the idea: The Civil War happened! And then we go from there. Here we're shown some of the politics surrounding it.

For one, there's a certain kind of anti-democratic spirit that infested a lot of Southern politics in the 1850s. Yes, the South had been appeased left and right for the previous 70 years, but there the beginning of the sense of the end of things regarding slavery with the expansion of territories, the unpopularity of slavery in various new places, and other pending situations. Catton demonstrates this anti-democratic sprit by showing the various ways the South decided that voting would not be the avenue on which these questions would be answered. The constant push toward one acceptable outcome, regardless of the means permeates the early part of the war.

The second weird anti-democratic situation we find ourselves in in Catton's history is how institutions are understood. The South decided that the Constitution allowed for secession, so they seceded. This creates the paradox that they are claiming sovereign status, but also demanding the laws of the US apply to how they are handled. It's like the Civil War begins: The South declares war. The North fights a war. The South: Pikachu shocked meme. The North for their part have the opposite situation. This is NOT a sovereign nation and therefore the laws do apply. So what then? It's interesting to see how much of the legality of the war and the things done in name of war were made on the fly (still the same way today).

The history is magnifying in a lot of good ways. There's a very heavy focus on the leadup, and we actually only just end this first of three volumes with the first Bull Run. That's 600 pages for two years, and presumably two more volumes at the same length remaining for each of the two year periods. Foote's books are huge, but he's not focusing so heavily on historical questions as narrating a giant story.

The Coming Fury is an excellent book detailing the tragic onset of the Civil War.

The book begins with the 186o Democratic convention in South Carolina, which eventually split off into a Southern and Northern Democratic camp and all but ensured Abraham Lincoln's election and the secession of the South. Lincoln's name did not even appear on the ballot in the Southern states, so much was the candidacy of this man loathed.

The Coming Fury, the first of Bruce Catton's famed Civil War trilogy, details the first months of a war that many patriotic Americans had hoped to see avoided, framing the onset of the Civil War as a time when extremists seized the day and forced an unbridgeable breakdown in diplomacy. The refusal of the South to recognize the ascendancy to power of a Republican party they viewed, despite the entreaties of Lincoln himself, as hostile to slave holding interests, led to a secession and bloody war which Catton chronicles in exceptional historical detail.

What may strike many readers early on is how publicly flippant Lincoln was toward the South's intentions in the time frame between his election and inauguration. Catton recounts his train trip from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration in early 1861, during which Lincoln gave numerous off-the-cuff speeches downplaying the potential for war and seeming to dismiss any notion that the secession of South Carolina and the tough talk from other Southern states about forming their own country was anything more than a bluff. Even his inaugural speech--given after several states had already seceded from the U.S.--extended a hand of friendship to the South, complete with a promise to leave slavery alone where it already existed (while preventing its extension into territories where it was unlikely to take root anyways).

The unwillingness to touch slavery as an issue during the initial part of the conflict constitutes much of the Civil War realpolitik that is often overlooked. At the time of his inauguration, Lincoln still held out hope that Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and other slave holding border states would remain in the Union; avoiding alienating them was crucial. Lincoln also recognized early on that many Northerners would rally to the cause of bringing the seceded states back into the Union (the act of secession rightly being viewed as treason) but would, aside from core abolitionists, not be willing to fight for the end of slavery. It would take time before the need for a more inspiring, overarching reason to fight was needed. Reading about the political gamesmanship involved on the slavery issue was not the only element of the delicate border state situations examined by Catton. The fact that the U.S. president nearly had the Maryland legislature arrested in 1861 (to prevent them from meeting and voting to secede, which would have left D.C. surrounded by hostile territory) and suspended habeus corpus there, having individuals arrested for anti-government speech, showed just how desperate of a situation the country found itself in. The work of Maryland's Governor Hicks in keeping his state in the Union perhaps staved off an early termination of the war at the hands of the Confederacy.

Governor Magoffin of Kentucky, a state of divided loyalties, demanded that neither Confederate or Union troops use his state as a staging ground for fighting--neutrality was the Bluegrass States's original stated policy. But perhaps outshining Kentucky or Maryland for border state madness was Missouri. The Coming Fury explains how this divided state, which had already seen violence in the 1850s during the rabid slavery vs. abolition debate, was basically the Wild West of the Civil War at the outset of fighting. The fighting between pro-Southern Confederate Governor Claiborne Jackson and pro-Union military man Nathaniel Lyon in the state, violence which saw pro and anti-Confederate ragtag troops and militias doing battle, with Lyon seizing a massive cache of weapons in St. Louis and which ultimately saw the governor having to flee his own state's capital and set up a government-in-exile near the Arkansas border--showed how, even early on, the war's potential for turning neighbor against neighbor.

Robert Anderson's efforts to keep the situation at Fort Sumter from igniting an all-out war was given ample attention, playing out like an extended drama. With Beauregard and Confederates in a stand-off with one of the last spots of Federal property in South Carolina, each calculated move between Montgomery (then the Confederate capital), Washington, and Charleston was a risky situation where one wrong step could lead to a catastrophic pitfall. Catton fills readers in admirably on this tricky, Civil-War starting scenario. The surrender of the fort, often seen as a catalyst for the war's beginning, is not written off as the sole final straw in the rest of the South's secession. The author points out that Lincoln's immediate call for Federal troops in the aftermath of the Sumter disaster sent the final Confederate states over the secessionist edge. During my time as a college student, at both UTPB UT Permian Basin and UTA UT Arlington, there was an extensive focus on history and wars in our classes, but an in-depth study of this subject was something that we never quite were able to receive. Getting an education in this is a near-necessity for any voting American, whether college bound or not; of all American wars to learn about, the Civil War most certainly deserves a close-up, truthful examination.

There were numerous anecdotes in The Coming Fury that even many dedicated Civil War readers might not have been aware of. Soon after the secession of Texas, the book tells about the travails of Robert E. Lee, stationed near San Antonio and still serving under the U.S. flag at that point. As he headed toward the Gulf Coast to steam back to Washington (ultimately to resign his commission to avoid taking up arms against his native Virginia) Lee briefly expressed worry that he would face arrest from local Texas Confederates and be taken as a prisoner-of-war. This ultimately did not take place, but it underscored the level of uncertainty created by the announcement of a new, sovereign nation by eleven Southern states.

The book not only delves into Lincoln's frame of mind, but examines the conflicted mindset of Jefferson Davis as well. A U.S. veteran and former U.S. Secretary of War, Davis is painted as a leader hoping against his instincts that the Confederacy will merely be left alone after announcing their split, something Lincoln felt he was duty bound under the Constitution to push back against.

Volume One, appropriately enough, closes with the Union rout at Bull Run. Pierre Beauregard's outmaneuvering of Irvin McDowell's men, leading to a near-trampling of spectators near the battle site, ends hope the North had that the re-joining of their Confederate brothers into the Union would be an easy process. This is made all the more tragic by the reality of one of The Coming Fury's central themes: the pre-Sumter hope experienced by both North and South that the brewing crisis could be ended without bloodshed. The polish and flow the book is written with makes readers anxious to begin Volume Two; the cliffhanger manner in which The Coming Fury concludes is only the last of many well-executed and competent writing techniques utilized by the long since deceased Bruce Catton.

-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado

I read this book on recomendation from a Civil War group here on GoodReads, after asking for a book about the time immediately before the war.

This book covers 1860 and 1861, from the Democratic Party convention in Charleston that tries (and fails) to nominate a candidate for the presidency through Bull Run, the battle that solidified the idea that the war would be neither short nor easy.

This book was written in the 1960s; this is actually the first part of the Centenial history of the war and Catton one of the most famous Civil War authors. Catton has a very good writing style, although he sometimes created some brief confusion for me when he mentioned things suddenly out of sequence. In several instances, I thought I had somehow missed a event being covered only to realize the book had indeed not gotten to there just yet but Catton was jumping ahead and "spoiling" events from later in the current chapter at the beginning of said chapter. The book doesn't need much in the way of maps, but what maps it does provide are poorly placed. That said, he covers all the events rather well.

I was loosely familiar with the events covered in the book but the details were pretty interesting. Some fun facts: John Bell's Constitutional Union party (a neutral 4th party, after the Republicans & a split Democratic Party) was a very serious contender and he was actually nominated before either Democratic candidate, neither Stephen Douglas nor Abraham Lincoln were actually present at the convention at which they were nominated president, Jefferson Davis was very nearly the Confederacy's top general rather than its president, and the Civil War could have started at Fort Pickens or in Texas (with Robert E Lee on the Union side!) before Fort Sumter finally happened.

Most interesting of all though was how HUGE slavery was. This book makes no mistake about the cause of the Civil War: slavery, slavery, slavery. Enough of the South was so rabidly pro-slavery that Stephen Douglas essentially destroyed his chances at the presidency for daring to advocate Popular Sovereignty, wherein a territory might be able to chose not to allow slaves. To paraphrase George Wallace a century later, they were fanatically devoted to "slavery now, slavery everywhere, slavery forever". Southern leadership basically went into the Democratic convention of 1860 determined to get their way or else. And if they didn't get their way, they'd split and run their own guy. And if he didn't win, they'd throw a fit and just secede, dammit! The South behaved like a petulant child, demanding it be given everything it wanted - with no compromises acceptable - or it would just up and leave. And that's exactly what happened and exactly what the South did. The picture painted is deeply disturbing. Interestingly, when the Confederacy was actually formed it was the more moderate Southerns who got got most of the power and the radicals were pushed off out of the spotlight.

That said, slavery was the issue for the South and the issue they left. The North is portrayed as not taking secession as a serious threat, feeling the South had become the Boy Who Cried Wolf and would never actually secede. And when they did it touched off a great deal of anger in the North and the common people were very ready to fight to prevent the Union from being broken, which the South had likewise not anticipated.