If you can't tell, I'm definitely in the "Civil War Dad" club (the two choices according to Mike from Church are Civil War Dad and WW2 Dad, and I've always found the Second World War to be way overhyped). I found this book at "the BookThing" in Baltimore (a used bookstore that's only open once a month), and it was the first of the fifteen book that I picked up that I actually read.

Spanning from the Republican and Democratic conventions in summer of 1860 to the First Battle of Bull Run in the Summer of 1861, this book is a narrative history, much like Battle Cry of Freedom, which made it very easy to read. Nearly ~500 pages for only a year of the war provided a much more detailed analysis than comparable sections in Battle Cry of Freedom. In particular, I got a much better sense of what the presidential campaign was like in 1860: Lincoln nor Douglas really traveled around the country much, other men campaigned for them instead, and of Lincoln's early days as President. Catton is much more sympathetic to Buchanan than McPherson, and more critical of Lincoln's early activity as president.

A simply outstanding history of the Civil War. There is a reason Catton's Trilogy is considered so authoritative and comprehensive. I would have liked to have had a bit more about the antebellum period and the lead-up to the war, but the focus of this work is really on the immediate build-up to the start of the war.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in learning more about this bloody conflict and its immediate causes.

"The Coming Fury" is book one in a series of three written for the centennial of the Civil War. It and its companion volumes, "The Terrible Swift Sword" and "Never Call Retreat" clearly served as source material for much of the popular literature and media produced about the Civil War since. The first volume provides a narrative of the events leading up to Fort Sumter, including the democratic and republican conventions, Lincoln's election and the secession of the Confederate states. Catton's narrative style is riveting, more akin to a novel than a history. He brings to life the characters and events preceding the horrible crash which was the dissolution of the Union. He exposes the political strife and extremism which precipitated the war (a sober warning to the extremity of current times.) He exposes the villains who placed interest above loyalty, displays the heart rending choices of those torn between honor and duty, and celebrates the heroes who knitted together the war torn pieces of the nation "with malice toward none, with charity for all". READ THIS SERIES! You will not be disappointed.

I borrowed Coming Fury from the public library when I was a mid-teen, right after it won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. I remember both enjoying the book and struggling with it, the prose a bit beyond my years. Now, after decades of reading denser texts, learning the characteristics of good writing, and turning a few descriptive phrases of my own, I have no difficulty pronouncing Catton’s book an impressive example of narrative exposition. The book is thoughtful and poetic, the kind in which you can catch yourself rereading sentences just to luxuriate in their skillful handling.

Though it’s hard to choose just one example, I’ll go with this description of Benjamin Butler’s 1861 encounter with self-liberated slaves:

“Butler, of Massachusetts, [was] a man seemingly appointed now, in the infinite Providence of God, to cast his own strange ray of revealing light on the way the war must go. To the relief of everyone, Butler had been lifted out of Maryland and had been set down, by the Federal War Department, at Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia peninsula. Here, trying to be an administrator and a warrior, succeeding imperfectly in each, he would bring up for definition the one thing both sides did not want mentioned just now—the deep underlying wrong of human slavery. Meaning nothing more than a good lawyer’s shrewdness, he helped to define the war. Into Butler’s lines, late in May, came three fugitive Negro slaves, men whose master had had them using pick and shovel to erect a battery for Confederate guns. Their arrival was unwelcome…. Butler, wholly devoid of feeling, had a lawyer’s cunning; had also, apparently an instinct for the inner meaning of things. Property of men in rebellion against the United States, he held—spades, wagons, farms, whatnot—could be taken over by the national authority as contraband of war; these three colored men were indisputably property, owned by a man in a condition of unrelieved rebellion, and they were, accordingly, contrabands. General Butler would hold them and use them. He had given a word to the national language and an idea to the national administration, and the word and the idea would go on working.”

BW

The Coming Fury is an excellent history of the antebellum period. This is not a battle volume; rather it is an astute political analysis. Catton provides excellent insight into the psychology of the period, which i have not found in any other period history. After reading the book, I understand far better the emotions and motivations of the principal actors of the day. I can also trace clear lineage (or at a minimum, parallels) to today's partisan gridlock. The stock phrase is that history repeats itself. While I don't buy that literally, the examples Catton develops in this wonderful volume certainly make me aware that history wants to repeat itself.

A great political history of the beginning stages of the US Civil War.

I’m guessing the most neutral account you can find on the American Civil War, at least by today’s standards; this was common in the 50s when the book was published and the social necessity to prove how bad the slaves had it wasn’t as necessary. That doesn’t mean the book isn’t exciting or low on criticism of either side, only that Catton correctly writes about the era as a different world altogether, populated by a nearly distinct people, which has only become ever more foreign since this take on it was released.

The book is rarely ever dull because of the personalities which define the era and institutions. The politicians, journalists, and citizens are strangely visual in their speech. The quotations he pulls exemplify an energy and oratory skill our nation has since lost.

My favorite parts are the political wheeling-and-dealing. The actual military fighting near the end was a bit dry for my taste, having never been blessed with that stereotypically boy-brained obsession with military strategy. Still, there is enough legend and curious asides to make up for what I may have been missing. (My copy was also furnished with illegible maps printed on the same paper stock as the rest of the book, useless for following along the antics of Bull Run as the author described them.)

Will be reading the next 2 volumes before the year is up.

9/10

Having recently completed Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War Trilogy, I believe this first volume is the strongest of the three, and stands well on it's own as a history of the lead up to the war.

Starting off with the political shenanigans that led to secession and the characters who ardently wished for it while the saner folk did not take the threat of war seriously enough, "The Coming Fury" unexpectedly succeeds in demonstrating Catton's ability to shine a spotlight on the humorous and the absurd in events which led up to the monumental tragedy. More than once I found myself laughing aloud at some absurdity or wry observation while reading this book.

Also notably, considering the time in which this was written, Catton never shys away from the fact that slavery was the root cause of the war. Sadly his trilogy becomes more friendly to "lost cause" narratives in the latter two books, and definitely treats the enslaved as "the other". To be talked about but not to, to be be fought over and sometimes pitied but not to be seen as an equal, as most conclusively demonstrated when Catton alludes to slave plantation owning Confederate President Jefferson Davis as "one of the most compassionate" men on earth in the final book of the trilogy.

All in all while I think most anyone with an interest in the war and particularly the political events that led up to it would gain from reading this volume, it still is not as packed with as many illuminating facts and perspective-giving anecdotes on how quickly culture and life was changing in the US in the lead up to the war as James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era". Which thoroughly covers the same ground as this book and the rest of Catton's trilogy and has been considered the standard one-volume history of the war for decades. And while I am glad I read "The Coming Fury" and the rest of Catton's Centennial Trilogy, I would recommend "Battle Cry of Freedom" over it, particularly as a first introduction to and overview of the war.

the road to Bull Run

A poetic, eloquent, expansive, accurate and authoritative account of the beginnings of the Civil War culminating in the fumbling, bumbling and grasping tragedy of the First Battle of Bull Run when neither winner or loser really knew what they were doing, or realised the gravity of what was happening.

Dare one say that this treasured history of events leading to the Civil War now seems...well...dated? Catton taught most of us "of an age" about the great American catastrophe of the 19th Century and was a fine teacher, indeed. Still, compared with the work of Shelby Foote which has a more modern tone, Catton's work does seem a bit cliched and oddly worded. That tiny whine noted, Catton remains as superb a historian as he seemed so many decades ago. A fine piece of scholarship neatly presented.