Confederate troops opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, just months after Abraham Lincoln's election. Click illustration for larger image. "DISSONANCE: THE TURBULENT DAYS BETWEEN FORT SUMTER AND BULL RUN" By David Detzer Harcourt ($27)

The site for the capital of the United States was chosen, in part, because it was indefensible.

The founders picked a vulnerable location for Washington, D.C., mostly flat land between Virginia and Maryland, to make a philosophical point, according to David Detzer. They wanted to demonstrate "to the world that their experiment in government was genuinely open."

It was a grand gesture that could have proved fatal to the Union in the days after South Carolina's attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor April 12, 1861.

Robert E. Lee, newly appointed commander of Virginia forces, could have brought cannon to the high ground at Arlington and shelled Washington. Alternately, he, or another more hot-blooded Confederate officer, might have brought Southern troops across the "Long Bridge" from Virginia and occupied the city.

Detzer explains why that didn't happen. That tale is one of the many interconnected stories describing what Lee, President Lincoln, Army Chief Winfield Scott and dozens of others did or failed to do during "the turbulent days" between Fort Sumter and Bull Run." The result is clear, enthralling, multifaceted history.

Detzer, a college history professor and the author of two other books on the start of the Civil War, uses many primary sources, including contemporary letters and newspaper accounts. He leavens those documents with analysis and informed opinion based on a lifetime of studying the era.

Like a big-budget Hollywood movie director, Detzer works with a large cast of leading and featured characters. Like a 19th-century novelist, he relies on memorable physical description to help readers keep the actors and action straight.

For example, he paints Massachusetts Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler as "almost shockingly ugly. At 43 years old, he looked as doughy as a two-hundred pound sack of suet."

The book is built around three major set pieces:

The gruesome march of the 6th Massachusetts regiment through a howling mob in Baltimore. The edgy city was anti-Lincoln and full of Southern sympathizers. It had a tradition of government by violent political gangs.

Equally gripping is the story of the loss of the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk, Va. Panic, confusion, inexperience and bad judgment all played roles in the abandonment of that military asset to the Confederates.

Homely Ben Butler and a slave named Luke played leading roles in the third scene.

While federal troops abandoned both the Harpers Ferry armory and Gosport shipyard, they held onto a third Southern outpost: Fort Monroe, just off the Virginia coast. Luke became the first of many enslaved blacks to seek refuge there.

Luke and other slaves were contraband, Butler declared. If their masters were in rebellion against the United States, their slaves need not be returned to their owners since their labor would benefit the Confederacy.

While Butler's legalistic position still viewed slaves as property rather than as people, the decision of Luke and others to flee transformed their status almost two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

"By their own choice, their own actions, with their own feet, they had altered their existence," Detzer writes. "And this did not involve something granted to them. They had reached out and grasped -- freedom ... Luke and his companions changed the nature of the Civil War."