In the last two chapters of this well-written and deeply researched book, Russell McClintock finally addresses that old chestnut of an issue: Abraham Lincoln's handling of the Fort Sumter crisis. What McClintock has to say about the maneuvering that led to the firing of the first shot is shrewd, nuanced, and definitely worth reading, but ultimately—and not surprisingly—he does not really dissent from the story on which most Civil War historians would now probably agree, which is that the president, recognizing that the opportunity to avoid war had evaporated (if it had ever existed), cleverly insured that the South would be seen in the North as the aggressor. The strength of this book, though, does not rest on its analysis of presidential decision making per se, but, first, on an argument about the relationship between what happened in the White House and the political process more broadly, and, second, on the thoroughness with which McClintock traces, on an almost day-by-day basis, the ebbs and flows of northern responses to what was happening in the South between Lincoln's election and the mobilization for war. More completely than previous scholarship, this account of those fraught months reveals the importance of misunderstandings, false rumors, and the delays and unreliability of published information. This is not the story of a steadily growing realization of the severity of the crisis; instead McClintock shows that the majority of northerners (the moderates who were not especially zealous about slavery one way or another) prevaricated and vacillated about what to do. The path to war was a winding one, and there was more than one dawn of false hope along the way.