Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

Maelstrom is a political novel about the Civil War.  It is also a sequel to Tempest at Dawn , my novel about the Constitutional Convention. Tempest at Dawn was about framing a nation and Maelstrom is about testing the tensile strength of the Framers work. Although both books stand alone, they share style and structure and some of the Framers descendants make brief appearances Maelstrom . I read stacks of books to get alternative perspectives on the players and events. One is The Impending Crisis in The South written in 1857 by Hinton Rowan Helper. Nothing like getting the skinny from someone who lived in the period. Helper begins his book with startling statistics. He compares the economies of slave and non-slave states at the time of the Framing of the Constitution to just prior to the Civil War. Here are some of his statistics comparing New York and Virginia.                               ...

President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 is credited with initiating the White House Easter Egg Roll. Multiple historical accounts indicate that informal egg-rolling parties took place on the White House grounds as far back as Lincoln's time, and perhaps Lincoln’s young son, Tad, should get the credit for starting the Easter tradition. Tad even dyed his own eggs and showed them off to his father. During Lincoln’s time, rolling hard-boiled eggs down lawn slopes was a popular Easter pastime. The White House gatherings, however, were small, semi-private affairs rather than the large public spectacles of today. Uninvited kids typically rolled eggs on the Capitol grounds until the damage to the lawn became so extensive that Congress banned the practice in the mid-1870s. That’s when President Hays opened up the White House South Lawn to the public for the White House Easter Egg Roll. Other than Tad and friends rolling eggs on the lawn, Easter observances for the First Family were low-key an...

The story of the greatest rivalry in American history   Here is the final cover for Maelstrom, A Civil War Novel. 

James Madison wrote a revealing letter to Thomas Jefferson in October of 1788. The following extract from the letter offers insight into Madison’s mindset and that of many of the Founders. Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents. Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done ...  restrictions, however strongly marked on paper, will never be regarded when opposed to the decided sense of the public This is an incredibly prescient letter. A good example of Madison’s wisdom would be the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). The Missouri Compromise (1820) prohibited slavery above Parallel 36°30′, and pro-slavery forc...

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  The American Founding documents contend that people have a natural right to form and reform governments. The Declaration of Independence states, "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."  Under that principle, elections are sacrosanct. Despite a raging Civil War, the United States held elections on November 4, 1863. As Commanding General of the U.S. Army, Ulysses S. Grant had to set the policy for military voting. On September 27, he wrote the following letter (abridged) to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. "The exercise of the right of suffrage by the officers and soldiers of armies is a novel thing. It has, I believe, generally been considered dangerous to constitutional liberty and subversive of military discipline. But our circumstances are novel and exceptional. A very large proportion of legal voters of the United States are now either under arms in the field, or in hospitals, or otherwise engaged in the mi...