Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History“The magnum opus of a great American historian.” —NewsweekNow in a new edition for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, David Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of antebellum America offers an indispensible analysis of the causes of the war between the states. The Journal of Southern History calls Potter’s incisive account, “modern scholarship’s most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War,” and the New York Times Book Review hails it as “profound and original…. History in the grand tradition.”

    These searingly vivid eyewitness reports form a continuous narrative of the war on all fronts, in the east and west, on land and sea, in battle and behind the lines in both South and North, from the first guns fired at Fort Sumter to the final stillness at Appomattox. The voices belong to the leaders and the generals, common soldiers and ordinary civilians, all caught up in the tumult and tidal movement of vast events. The result is the Civil War as it really was and what it really meant to America and Americans.

    Wilson and his three Union cavalry divisions. His aims were to destroy the iron furnaces and the Confederate arms manufacturing centre of Selma, and to capture the then former state capital, Montgomery.