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The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War. By Mark Tooley (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2015, Pp. xvi, 299. $26.99.)
Methodist historian Mark Tooley has written a fascinating account of an event that is little known today, a last ditch effort to avert a civil war through the efforts of a conference held in Washington, DC in February 1861. We know, of course, that such an effort proved futile, but a study of this now obscure conference yields new insights into the events surrounding the beginning of the war and the mood of the country at the time.
With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the state of South Carolina, as it had promised, seceded from the Union. Six other southern states followed suit. These state governments began to seize federal property within their borders. The nation was on the brink of war, but in such an unprecedented situation no one knew what would happen, particularly once Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861. The last-minute attempt to work...