Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

  “It can be lost, and it will be, if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded… merely as curiosities in glass cases.” So spoke Harry Truman about the Declaration of Independence. He also called it a “supreme expression of our profound belief.” How did this world-shattering document come about?  Read all about it at the American Thinker American Exceptionalism

  The story of the greatest rivalry in American History. Buy at Amazon

  At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slaveholding states were far stronger than their northern counterparts. After sixty years, the free states’ explosive growth had left the South far behind. It was as if the South was in a footrace wearing concrete boots. Hinton Helper, a mid-19th-century southerner, identifies that concrete as slavery.  The political implications are interesting. During this massive economic transition and with slavery under moral attack, slaveholders managed to retain dominating political power. How did they accomplish this feat? Slaves were treasured assets in the antebellum South. Slaves defined social status. Slaves made plantation owners wealthy. Slaves made life easy. Slavery made everyone who was not a slave feel freer and privileged. Slavery wasn’t just property; it was a way of life and the linchpin of an aristocratic society. How do you protect an asset that can walk away? How do you counter altruists who want to banish that asset? Huma...

Bruce Chadwick's Two American Presidents should have been a perfect reference book for Maelstrom . Maelstrom  chapters alternate between the two presidents to show how each dealt with the same issues, countered the other’s moves, led their respective governments, and used their political powers to sway the outcome. Unfortunately, Chardwick's book was infested with so many errors that I discarded it less than halfway through. Two American Presidents is haphazardly  written  and poorly edited. It is hard to follow the chronology and is occasionally outright wrong in the sequence of events. There are too many good books out there to recommend this one. 

  The photo on the left could be considered the kick-off image for Lincoln's presidential campaign. The photo on the right was taken about two months before his assassination. The presidency ages people, but a war ravages the soul. The photo on the left was taken by Mathew Brady in his New York studio on February 27, 1860, before Lincoln publicly acknowledged that he was a candidate for the presidency. Lincoln was in New York to deliver an address at Cooper Union. Tradition has it that the Cooper Union Address and the Brady photograph taken on the same day propelled Lincoln into the White House. The photo on the right was taken by Alexander Gardner   on February 5, 1865, which was after Lincoln's reelection but before his inauguration. By this time, Gardner had left Brady to run his own studio. (Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1865; Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865; and Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.) The contrast between the two photographs is dramatic a...

The story of the greatest rivalry in American history. Larry Schweikart , co-author of New York Times bestselling A Patriot's History of the United States and many other history books, has reviewed a beta copy of Maelstrom, A Civil War Novel . " Tempest at Dawn was simply the best fictional account of the forming of the Constitution that has ever been written. Now, James Best takes on Lincoln in his latest, Maelstrom . Battling the Slave Power conspiracy, Lincoln faced a wide array of other opponents: factions inside his own party, a hostile Supreme Court, an unfriendly press, and foreign powers that wanted him---and America---to fail. See Lincoln as you've never seen him before as he navigates the maelstrom of the Civil War." Read  Larry Schweikart's substack where he makes further comments on Maelstrom as well as several other history books.

  Jefferson Davis, American William J. Cooper Jr.   Jefferson Davis, American (2000) was published four years after William C. Davis’s Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (1996). In this reviewer’s opinion, American is a superior biography compared to The Man and His Hour . (More provocatively titled as well.) I judge biographies by if I feel I know the person afterward. After reading The Man and His Hour , I knew what Jefferson did, but after American , I felt I understood this complicated man. Cooper is sympathetic toward Davis and sometimes comes across as an apologist. However, it’s this very sympathy that lifts the book from a dry biography, offering a glimpse of the man in his time. Davis is a difficult subject for a biography. When the Confederacy fled Richmond, most of the records were burned. Consequently, there are far fewer primary sources available to a biographer of a Confederate figure than there are for a Unionist biographer. Thus, Confederate historians re...

How did Antebellum Slaveholders Protect Slavery? How do you protect an asset that can walk away? How do you counter altruists who want to banish that asset? Read the article at American Thinker .

  Constituting America's 2026 Study is: The Consent of the Governed Today's essay is Samuel Adams and the Boston Tea Party by James D. Best. Read it here and explore Constituting America 250 . A fun and educational celebration of America's 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

  Book 2 in the American Exceptionalism Series Maelstrom, A Civil War Novel , is now available for Kindle preorder. Release Date June 1, 2026 (Hardcover and paperback will also be available on June 1, 2026) “I enjoyed this.”  Harold Holzer, Lincoln Prize winner and Chair of The Lincoln Forum “See Lincoln as you've never seen him before as he navigates the maelstrom of the Civil War.”  Larry Schweikart, NYTimes #1 bestselling author Maelstrom tells the story of the greatest rivalry in American history. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis led their nations in a must-win fight, and Maelstrom shows how each dealt with the same issues, countered the other’s moves, led their respective governments, and used their political powers to sway the outcome. Read the first chapter free HERE .

  William C. Davis’s Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour is a major contribution to Civil War history. To get the full picture of a major historical event, you need to study both sides of an issue.  Davis helps us by presenting the Confederate view. (Since the author and subject have the same last name, although unrelated, I will use the term “author” for William C. Davis.) This highly researched book presents fascinating details of Davis’s life and actions. The writing is smooth and easy to understand. It gives a reasonable account of Confederate and Davis’s views. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour is a good way to learn about the conflict from the secessionist perspective. The biography falters in its attempt to rationalize Davis’s personality flaws. The author seeks sympathy for Jefferson Davis, but his arrogance, combativeness, and stubbornness undermine this effort. At times, the author seems almost surprised by Davis’s failings, excusing them as "insecurity." Ul...

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...

 

Everything might change, of course, but for now, I have selected the book cover prototype below. If this cover is finally used, a graphic designer will dress it up to make it look professional.  Comments welcome.  

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln Doris Kearns Goodwin Goodwin’s smooth style is reader-friendly. Team of Rivals , published in 2005, has become a standard in the crowded Lincoln genre, winning the Lincoln Prize and the Book Prize for American History.  Team of Rivals was also a finalist for several other prizes. More than 18,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, making him one of the most documented figures in history. To market a new perspective, many Lincoln scholars seek to offer a unique take on one of the most studied men in history. Goodwin, when not the narrator herself, allows Lincoln’s cabinet to tell his story.  Every president since George Washington has governed with a cabinet, and the cabinet is often given short shrift by historians. Rightly so, in many cases. But Lincoln was different. He filled his cabinet and lesser positions with his Republican competitors, northern Democratic Party leaders, and other powerful rivals within...