The Civil War shaped America more than any other event in our history. Battles are still being fought in the court of public opinion over the Confederate flag.

David J. Eicher’s ‘‘The Longest Night” is a comprehensive yet fairly concise one volume history of the war. The book begins with Fort Sumter and ends with the surrender of the Southern armies in the days after the fall of Richmond.

There is no long preamble postulating the causes of the bloodletting. The author merely sets out to record it in all its manifestations from the famous battles of the east to the lesser known struggles in the trans-Mississippi Theater.

Both sides were woefully unprepared for war and most partisans expected a brief conflict. The regular Army had only 16,000 troops on Jan. 1, 1861. Huge levies would eventually be called on by both sides.

Pressure forced an unprepared Union Army to attempt to take Richmond. The author calls this an ‘‘ill-formed notion that if it captured the Rebel capital, the strategic objective of the war would be fulfilled. This was an idea that was widely believed and preached by European militarists of the era. It would take months and many bloody battles for commanders on both sides to realize in order to win they would have to destroy enemy armies rather than simply occupy enemy territory.”

Largely amateur masses lurched toward each other near Manassas, Va. in the first major battle of the war in July of 1861. Irwin McDowell led some 35,000 Federals toward Confederate Gen. P.G. Beauregard’s 22,000 men. The Battle of Bull Run was almost a Yankee victory, but the Rebels turned the tide and routed the men in blue.

Many of our most celebrated generals would achieve fame in the war. Stonewall Jackson held his ground at Manassas and went on to become the second greatest Confederate general, after Robert E. Lee. The two men were a great team.

Jackson’s predecessors were not so in tune with the mind of the great Lee and this would prove disastrous at Gettysburg.

Midwesterners, Grant and Sherman led the North. One a failure before the war went on to command the entire Union effort and the other overcame a possible nervous breakdown early in the war to go on to make Georgia howl.

Eicher does a very nice job in presenting a straight forward narrative of our bloodiest war.