Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

  Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln  by Edward Achorn “Every drop of blood” is a melancholy line from Lincoln’s second inaugural address. It is an appropriate title for Achorn's book. What should have been a glorious occasion was marred by the ongoing Civil War. As the subtitle states, the book focuses on Lincoln’s second inaugural and is filled with contemporary perspectives and quotations. Supposedly, Every Drop of Blood covers twenty-four hours around the inauguration, but Achorn cheats a bit, occasionally using flashbacks to put the narration in perspective. As I mentioned in previous book reviews, I like single-issue books on the Civil War era. So much happened that any attempt to cover the entire time period must be a summary, leaving much detail on the cutting room floor. Achorn fulfills the mission of single-issue history, providing trivia, facts, and insights for enthusiasts. This is a must-read for those who seek to unders...

Characterization is a crucial element of fiction. Novelists must know the people they write about, or they may behave in ways contradictory to their personality. Historians don’t generally try to get inside a subject’s head, while a novelist thrives in invading others’ privacy. A novelist makes personality and motivations central to the story.  Before I write the first word of a historical novel, I read several biographies of the major characters to get a perspective on their distinctiveness. I read positive and negative perspectives to get a grasp of who these people were. Where do you find these personal descriptions of historical figures? First, I go to history books. Historians do not normally try to portray their subject’s thoughts and feelings, but they don’t ignore personality. Good ones dutifully quote contemporary descriptions of the subject to satisfy documentation requirements. The second place I go to is to the historical figures’ own writing. A person’s writing always ...

The Demon of Unrest  A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson I generally enjoy single-issue Civil War books but started this one prepared to dislike it. I feared the subtitle disguised a dry dissertation with hyperbolic “H” words. Then in the foreword, Larson equates January 6 to the Civil War. That was a bit overwrought. I settled into the book looking forward to writing an oh-so-clever, nasty review. Not to be. The book was a good example of single-issue books on the Civil War. The Demon of Unrest is about the start of the war. There are so many Civil War-era books that to write something fresh, it is almost necessary to focus on some isolated feature. There have been Civil War books on a particular speech, an issue, technology, a battle, or a single event. Biographies and general history books must omit much detail and interesting tidbits. It was a big war with lots of players. Going deep into a subject is the bailiwick of these sin...

The South Was Right by James Ronald Kennedy and Walther Donald Kennedy I am not an advocate of Lost Cause, but in writing Maelstrom , I needed to understand it. One of the books I read was The South Was Right. The authors claim the Civil War was not about slavery, and the Southern states had a right to secede from the oppressive North. The three points in the preceding sentence encapsulate the Lost Cause and this book. Anyone who has read 1860 campaign platforms, pre-war congressional speeches, or the proceedings at the state secession conventions doubts that the conflict was about slavery. The Confederate Constitution also makes it clear. If more evidence is needed, read Confederate political and newspaper reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation. Jefferson Davis, before the Confederate Congress, protested the Emancipation Proclamation: “Our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” Freeing slaves was the worst ac...