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A tragic story is easily told. Battle pictures are not hard to paint with words or brush. It is more difficult to trace with accuracy the beginning of revolutionary movements, for these are from their very nature hidden from the common view, often more carefully concealed in proportion to their importance.
In these pages, Crawford unfolds the story of those events that led to the national struggle between the North and the South in the war for the union of the States. As the medical officer of Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter, Crawford worked closely with Major Robert Anderson and was a part of the beginning and end of our first combat with secession. He witnessed the first and the last shot sent against Fort Sumter that aroused the country to war. He was in almost daily attendance upon the convention that passed the Ordinance of Secession. Besides his personal association with and study of the secession movement at its very initiative, Crawford has, through years of inquiry, reached documents and conclusions of great importance.
Statesmen, philosophers, and laymen have given utterance to much that occurred after the clash of arms began. However, the story of the beginning of the Civil War, and a picture of what the combat was about, had never been presented in consecutive form prior to this. The Genesis of the Civil War is not intended to embrace a recital of the long train of those predisposing causes that developed into a fatal antagonism with the growth of the nation. Crawford focuses instead on the events of an immediate and exciting nature, precipitated by the secession of South Carolina and proceeding unchecked in their course, that finally plunged the country into war.
