Bruce Chadwick: 1858

In 1858, fate had yet to pay its call on them. Abraham Lincoln was giving galvanizing speeches across Illinois...and losing an election. Jefferson Davis was suffering the health consequences of an old hotel tryst in Cuba. William Tecumseh Sherman, the general who later observed that "war is hell", was trying - and failing - to sell corn at a roadside stand.

In a couple of years, everything would change. But in 1858, none of them knew what was coming.

1858 is the prologue to the American Civil War, ending with the first shots fired on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861. But it is less a survey of the era than a study of characters: James Buchanan as an odd-looking, maniacal disaster of a president, bent on conquering Paraguay, and John Brown as an imposing, biblical fury, determined to force America to confront the issue Buchanan was determined to ignore: slavery.

With the nation mired in a series of patchwork laws and untenable compromises, Bruce Chadwick finds the same crossroads in the men who would take center stage in the war to come. He relishes in personal details from the lives of major figures like Robert E. Lee, describing the Confederacy's chief strategist confounded by a rebellious slave named Reuben, or watching as Abraham Lincoln sticks to cheap taverns for dinner on the campaign trail, traveling on a tight budget as he plots how to outwit Stephen A. Douglas in their next debate. 1858 is a story of a country seeking to chart a way ahead, and the decisions made by a handful of men that would set its course.

Bruce Chadwick is a former journalist and editor at the New York Daily News. He is the author of eight books on history, including The Reel Civil War and The General and Mrs. Washington. He lectures on American history at Rutgers and also teaches writing at New Jersey City University.