The New Yorker:

Visiting the site where the Civil War began, for clues on how the cold war of the present may end.

By Adam Gopnik

Last weekend, with the testing of liberal democracy days away, I found myself in Charleston, South Carolina, and decided to go out to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, and the last greatest threat to the possibility of something recognizably like a free country took place. Charleston is a city with a double consciousness, even more acute than most American places: it is among the prettiest and most welcoming of cities, with a unique density of charming houses—antebellum in appearance, though almost all postbellum in creation—that makes even the nicest parts of Beacon Hill, in Boston, or Society Hill, in Philadelphia, seem meagre.The houses turn shyly away from the street, their verandas or porches facing sideways, as though keeping a secret. It was also, of course, the commercial center of the slave trade, a business so fierce and so brutal—at least one of the markets where people were bought and sold remains—that it still beggars the imagination. Charleston is one of my favorite places in America; it was also the site of the first declaration of secession from the Union, on the principle of permanent enslavement.

I was there for a literary festival—an event at which authors meet to assure one another that they have, in fact, read all of one another’s books and forgiven all of one another’s reviews—but I wanted badly to see Fort Sumter, which stands on an island in Charleston Harbor. I have written often about Lincoln and the Civil War, and there was something about visiting the cradle of the last great conflagration that seemed essential at this time.

Go to link