Empire of Errors before the First Shot

No war begins with a single mistake. The bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 — the opening salvo of the American Civil War — was not the cause of national fracture but its final symptom: the audible collapse of a political order that had been quietly failing for years, sustained only by compromise, wilful misreading, and the shared delusion that catastrophe could still be avoided. The fa...