Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

    Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War  Tony Horwitz Confederates in the Attic is a present-day (1998) memoir of a Civil War tour. The book is appropriately titled. When you rummage around an attic, you find all kinds of junk. Junk that’s past its prime, odd reminders of bygone days, nostalgic twaddle, and utter fantasies. Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, finds all of these and more. Unfortunately, he spends too much time in the shadowy recesses of his metaphorical attic. The encountered characters and whimsical writing make the tour fascinating, but there’s not much substance added to the lore of this bloody conflict. That’s not a criticism because the book’s intent is to investigate lingering sentiments, not to uncover facts or artifacts. The narrative actually references a great deal of Civil War history, and I found no errors of note. (The characters in this memoir would prefer the War Between the States, or even bett...

  The Truth of the War Conspiracy of 1861 A Reassessment of Why the American Civil War Began by H W Johnstone   This booklet was published in 1921 by a Civil War veteran. The author’s intent is to advocate for The Lost Cause and expose the “truth.” I’ve read several modern-day defenses of The Lost Cause, but I wanted to get the perspective of someone closer in time to the conflict. A participant was even better, although Johnstone served for only an unexplained eight months. Unfortunately, time and participation provided few novel insights. I shouldn't have been surprised because years earlier, Jefferson Davis had articulated the dogma of The Lost Cause in his two histories of the Confederate States of America. Johnstone argues that a duplicitous President Lincoln started the war by reinforcing Forts Sumter and Pickens, the last Union military presence in the seceded states. First, the duplicitous part. In his inaugural, Lincoln said, “The power confided to me will be used to...

  Dixie Betrayed, How the South Really Lost the Civil War  by Davis J. Eicher To understand the Civil War period, it is necessary to study the war from both sides. Dixie Betrayed by Davis J. Eicher provides the view from the Confederate side. Dixie Betrayed is a different book than the title implies. The last words of Eicher’s book are “Jefferson Davis had lost his power as Confederate president — but not before the whole cause of the Confederacy was lost. Dixie was Betrayed.”  The title and these final words actually betray the worth of this book.  Nearly twenty thousand books have been written about Lincoln and almost a hundred thousand about the Civil War. Less than an estimated twenty percent of these were written from a Confederate perspective, and many of those were Lost Cause screeds. Since the Confederacy lost, official documents were often destroyed, requiring historians to rely on sources like newspapers, letters, and memoirs—and these are not nearly as w...

  Grant Takes Command 1863-1865 by Bruce Catton When asked what sort of man Grant was, Lincoln replied that Ulysses S. Grant was “the quietest little fellow you ever saw. The only evidence you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is, things move." Lincoln explained that every other general briefing him before a battle told him that he was short of some crucial resource to ensure victory, but, if ordered, they would proceed anyway. This essential resource was almost always cavalry, and Lincoln claimed their real purpose was to shift responsibility to him. When Grant took charge, he immediately reassigned twenty thousand horseless cavalrymen to the infantry. Since there was no way to acquire horses for every man designated as cavalry, these soldiers were held idle as a handy excuse. Recognizing the duplicity, Grant removed the excuse before his first battle. In this biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning Bruce Catton does an excellent job of describing the...