"As America continues to struggle with the social and racial legacies of its civil war, Wesley Moody takes the reader back to that wars origins in an accessible and insightful analysis of the background to, and eventual fall of Fort Sumter in 1861. Expertly locating the microhistory of the stand-off in Charleston Harbor in the wider narrative of a nation dedicated to liberty that clung, at terrible cost, to slavery, Moody relocates Fort Sumter as central to the Civil War story: the ultimate symbol of that conflicts causes, its costs, and its continuing significance for the nation."
Susan-Mary Grant, author of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
"In The Battle of Fort Sumter, Wesley Moody brings life to the historical players: planters, politicians, enslaved people, and Confederate and Union wives and children of the era. With an extraordinary number of sources and notes, Moody provides full transcripts of documents for the reader to analyze. Set alongside the secondary text, the reader will find primary sources, including fully captioned and contextualized images, as well as letters and government documents of importance. Moody provides a useful and concise description of the evolution of political parties, from politicians with personalities, to proto-party organizations, and then how the divisions turned from political party split, to a North/South divide."
Maggi M. Morehouse, author of Civil War America: A Social and Cultural History with Primary Sources
