Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

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 .

  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.                               ...

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...