Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

    On March 14 and 15, on the University of Arizona campus, more than 130,000 readers and over 300 authors will celebrate the written word at the  2026 Tucson Book Festival .   If you can, come and join the party. The Tucson Book Festival is one of the largest book fairs in the nation. I’ll be there, and so will my books. Well, at least three of them.  Tempest at Dawn ,  The Shopkeeper ,   and   The Shut Mouth Society  will be featured at the Wheatmark Booth, #159. I am signing books on Sunday and will post an update after I am assigned a time slot. Hope you can make it!

Proper decorum be damned. In 1856, Senator Sumner from Massachusetts gave a mocking speech meant to ridicule slave owning Democrats. Democrats would have none of it. They puffed up with sanctimony and called Sumner’s speech “self-righteously insolent.” They believed slavery was a general good, and a Republican had no right to challenge their narrative.  A day or so later, Congressman Preston Brooks waltzed into the Senate chamber and marched up to Senator Sumner and blindsided him with his cane. Southern senators could have stopped him, but instead watched as he beat Sumner on the head with all his might. Sumner suffered incapacitation for nearly five years. Brooks was quoted as saying that it was fortuitous that he caught Sumner in “a helpless attitude” because “Sumner had superior strength and if mindful, he would have needed to shoot him with his revolver.” The entire South applauded and exulted Brooks for his bravery. When Republican Congressman Burlingame chastised Brooks ...

In 1864, an anonymous hardbound pamphlet was published entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The word "miscegenation" was coined by the authors who claimed it was a scientific theory describing how racial blending enhances humanity. The pamphlet encouraged the interbreeding of people from different racial or ethnic groups through marriage or sexual relations. During the Civil War period, the North was terrified that freed slaves would swarm their states. Racial bigotry was real and serious. Northerners were frightened for good reasons. For seven decades, slaveholders and their sympathizers in the North had exclaimed on the floor of Congress, in newspapers, in churches, and in pubs that emancipation would cause hordes of black men to migrate north to take the White man’s job and daughters. Tribal instincts were fanned until they were burned into the subconscious of most Americans. After their defeats at ...

During the American Civil War, soldiers were allowed to vote by mail. This was the first instance of mail-in ballots in the nation's history. At the time, of course, only men had the right to vote. In the 1862 mid-year elections, many soldiers were given leave to return home to vote. It was detrimental to the war effort, so in 1864 the Union tried a new concept: mail-in ballots. Lincoln felt this was important to his reelection because a higher proportion of Republicans enlisted.  On September 27, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant wrote to the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: The exercise of the right of suffrage by the officers and soldiers of armies is a novel thing. 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 military service of the United States … they are American citizens, having still their homes and social and political ties binding them to the States and districts from which they come...