Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

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. 

  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...

  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.                               ...

While researching Maelstrom , a follow-on novel to Tempest at Dawn , I dug into the details of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Democrats pushed the bill through with a slim margin, and it was signed into law by Millard Fillmore. Reaction in free states was swift and bitter. Protests erupted overnight in almost every northern population center, with many openly proclaiming that they would not obey an unconstitutional law. Slaveholders dismissed the protests as “mongrel gatherings.” By itself, the Fugitive Slave Act did not cause the Civil War, but it tilted the slave issue in favor of the slaveholding states, enraged the North, and encouraged the South's overbearing behavior. Here’s what the law required. The federal government took away state authority to find, return, and try escaped slaves. The bill established a body of commissioners to hear cases with no right of appeal to the legal system. Commissioners were paid $5 when they found for the accused and $10 when they ordered th...

  Memoir of Ulric Dahlgren  by Admiral Dahlgren   Like A Meteor Blazing Brightly:  The Short but Controversial Life of Colonel Ulric Dahlgren  by Eric J. Wittenberg These Ulric Dahlgren biographies present the Union and Confederate views of the Dahlgren Affair.   Here is the gist of the “Affair.” In February of 1864, a Union cavalry detachment raided Richmond in the hope of releasing imprisoned soldiers captured by the Confederacy. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren led a major arm of the assault. The raid was unsuccessful, and Dahlgren was killed in an ambush. Papers were found on Dahlgren’s body that ordered the raiding party to murder Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. The Union claimed the papers were forgeries while the Confederacy insisted they were genuine. At the time, the Dahlgren Affair became a cause célèbre. The authenticity of the papers remains unresolved.   Ulric’s father, Admiral Dahlgren, called the papers forgeries and maintained that his son would...

  The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won By Edward H. Bonekemper III The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo This post deals with two books on the “Lost Cause.” Thomas J. DiLorenzo presents the case for the Lost Cause in The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, while Edward H. Bonekemper argues against the Lost Cause in The Myth of the Lost Cause : Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won. What is the Lost Cause? The basic tenants are as follows: the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with slavery; the South did nothing to provoke war; the Constitution included a right to secede and the South should have been allowed to leave peacefully; antebellum life in the South was prosperous, dignified, and just; slavery was already dying; Robert E. Lee deserved deification, U. S. Grant deserved demonization, t...