The politics of the Mexican War obviously deserve their own nod, and from this angle, I have found Charles G. Sellers’s two-volume James K. Polk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1966) and Paul Bergeron’s The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987) quite helpful. But the other aspects of the war have also been well covered in a number of newer books on this almost forgotten conflict by K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974), by Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and by John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The War with Mexico (New York: Random House, 1989).
The Compromise of 1850 was the offspring of the Mexican-American War, and the connection of the two events is magisterially handled by Nevins and Potter. But I have also found Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964) to be very helpful. The opposition to the Compromise can be understood through K. Jack Bauer’s biography Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). Calhoun’s political papers and the two great Compromise speeches he gave in 1847 and 1850 have been collected and published by Ross E. Lence in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992). Stephen A. Douglas, the rescuer of the Compromise, has been capably analyzed in Robert W. Johannsen’s Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Lincoln’s early criticisms of Douglas and Kansas-Nebraska are discussed in Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). I have found David Donald’s Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1961) to be as useful as it is legendary.
For the general shape of American politics in the 1850s, no one can afford to ignore Michael F. Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Joel Silbey’s The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). In addition to Holt’s heavyweight tome on the Whigs, I have turned to Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), Heather Cox Richardson’s The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Michael S. Green’s Freedom, Union and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), William E. Gienapp’s The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and the essays in Robert F. Engs and Randall Miller’s The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Among the many political biographies of Republicans available, two of the most thorough are Hans L. Trefousse, Benjamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio (New York: Twayne, 1965) and Frederick J. Blue, Salmon Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986).
The Dred Scott decision was clearly the greatest juridical hot potato of the 1850s, and the single most important book on the case is Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law has been well described in Thomas P. Slaughter’s Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
THREE. YEAR OF METEORS
No other single figure in American history has generated so much biography and analysis as Abraham Lincoln. The most comprehensive modern biography of Lincoln is the two-volume magnum opus of Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); the most famous and durable single-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln remains Benjamin P. Thomas’s classic Abraham Lincoln (New York: Modern Library, 1952), although David Donald’s Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) is a very close competitor. For those who thirst after every detail, only Mark E. Neely Jr.’s The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982) and Earl Schenck Miers’s three-volume Lincoln Day-by-Day: A Chronology (Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960) will suffice. Lincoln’s Collected Works were assembled by Roy P. Basler in a nine-volume set under the auspices of the Abraham Lincoln Association and published by Rutgers University Press in 1953 (two supplement volumes were subsequently issued), but these will be augmented by Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Two other critical collections of Lincoln-related documents are Emmanuel Hertz’s The Hidden Lincoln, from the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Viking, 1938) and Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Statements and Interviews About Abraham Lincoln, edited by Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). The finest study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates remains Harry V. Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).
The preeminent surveys of the national agony that stretched from Lecompton to Sumter remain Allan Nevins’s two volumes, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859 and The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), and Potter’s The Impending Crisis. Potter’s Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942) remains a remarkably durable and interesting work, but for a much broader chronological sweep and a direct focus on the South and secession, William W. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) must be consulted.
For specific studies of secession in the Southern states, William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), Steven A. Channing, A Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) remain important contributions. The literature of secession has been captured handsomely in Jon Wakelyn’s Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860–April 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The events surrounding the attack on Fort Sumter are gracefully recounted in William A. Swanberg’s First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York: Scribner, 1957) and most recently in David Detzer’s Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
FOUR. TO WAR UPON SLAVERY
The military history of the American Civil War has been so much the object of the military history buff that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle faddism and hobby writing from the serious history of Civil War combat. First reading for any serious student of Civil War combat must be Paddy Griffith’s Battle Tactics of the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), followed by Edward Hagerman’s The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), and Brent Nosworthy’s sprawling The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003). Sharply focused studies of American strategic doctrine include Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat (New York: Free Press, 1992), and Donald J. Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). One fair
ly eccentric but highly informative interpretation of Civil War combat is Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982).
The opening campaigns of the war mentioned in this chapter can be traced in greater detail in a plethora of battle histories, beginning with William C. Davis’s Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), Joanna McDonald’s “We Shall Meet Again”: The First Battle of Manassas, July 18–21, 1861 (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1999), Ethan Rafuse’s A Single Grand Victory: The First Campaign and Battle of Manassas (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002), and David Detzer’s Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004). George McClellan is the subject of two highly interesting biographies: Ethan Rafuse’s McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) and Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1987), which should be read in conjunction with Sears’s book on the Antietam campaign, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, CT: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), and his history of the Peninsula, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992).
The Peninsula brought Robert E. Lee to the forefront of the Civil War, and the four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936) and Emory Thomas’s Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) remain the place to begin with the great Virginia general, although readers with a taste for iconoclasm should not miss Thomas L. Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Knopf, 1977), Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000) or Alan Nolan’s Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). A more unusual approach to Lee’s life can be found through his letters in Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2008). John Hennessy’s Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) offers a particularly good account of this long-neglected battle, while the literature on Antietam is particularly rich in having for its chroniclers James V. Murfin in The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, September, 1862 (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1965) and Benjamin F. Cooling in Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), as well as an unusual reference work in Joseph L. Harsh’s Sounding the Shallows: A Confederate Companion for the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000).
The final object of the battles came back to the question of slavery and its future, and for understanding the agonizing position of blacks who wanted the war for the Union to become a war for freedom. The most comprehensive survey undertaken of emancipation and its consequences is that of the Freedom and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, and especially in the three volumes of the first series of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867—The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and in a general anthology, Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992). The controversial question of Lincoln’s motives and intentions in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation have been handled from numerous angles by Don D. Fehrenbacher, “Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro,” in Civil War History 20 (December 1974), George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” in the Journal of Southern History 61 (February 1975), and Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln and the Preconditions for Emancipation” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. W. A. Blair and K. F. Younger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). LaWanda Cox’s Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) offers a sympathetic portrayal of Lincoln and race; at entirely the other end is Lerone Bennett’s forceful but erratic Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000). Burrus Carnahan’s Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007) unties the legal knots surrounding emancipation and the Proclamation.
FIVE. ELUSIVE VICTORIES
The intricate story of the political compromises that kept Kentucky and Missouri from joining the Confederacy has been told in several venerable but still important studies, E. Merton Coulter’s The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), Edward C. Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1927), William H. Townsend, Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955), William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1963). More recently, provocative new work on the Border States has emerged in Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Lowell H. Harrison, Lincoln of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), and William C. Harris’s Lincoln and the Border States in the Civil War (2011). The most important figure in the subsequent campaigning across Kentucky and Tennessee in early 1862 is Ulysses S. Grant, whose Personal Memoirs are among the mainstays of Civil War literature (the edition used here is from the Library of America volume of Grant’s Memoirs and Selected Letters, but the Memoirs have been reprinted numerous times over the century since they first appeared). Almost as fascinating a literary monument to Grant is the three-volume biography of Grant begun by Lloyd Lewis in Captain Sam Grant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950) and finished by Bruce Catton in Grant Moves South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960) and Grant Takes Command (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968). Grant’s most recent biographers have included the highly critical William S. McFeely, in Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), a polar opposite in Brooks Simpson in Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), Simpson’s Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), Edward H. Bonekemper, A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Military Genius (Lanham, MD: Regnery, 2004), Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and Michael Ballard, U. S. Grant: The Making of a General, 1861–1863 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Grant’s personal and official papers and letters have been made available through the late John Y. Simon’s immense project, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–).
Among the best books on the early western military campaigns is the first volume to offer a comprehensive account of them, Manning Ferguson Force’s From Fort Henry to Corinth (New York: Scribner’s, 1881), which was written as part of the Scribner’s campaigns series in the 1880s. Among the more recent accounts of the operations on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers are James Hamilton, The Battle of Fort Donelson (South Brunswick, NJ: T. Yoseloff, 1968) and Benjamin F. Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988). The Confederate commanders who struggled to shore up the crumbling edges of the Confederacy’s western lines have enjoyed a surprising number of useful and durable biographies, beginning with William Preston Johnston’s biography of his father, The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston (New York: D. Appleton, 1879). T
he most significant of these biographies is Grady McWhiney’s Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, vol. 1: Field Command (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), although McWhiney eventually left it to another biographer, Judith Hallock, to finish the narrative of Bragg’s ill-starred career. The overall shape of Confederate decision making in the western part of the country in 1862–63 is covered in Archer Jones, Confederate Strategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961), while Thomas L. Connelly offered a collective biography of the Confederacy’s western army in Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), and joined with Archer Jones to write The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). The first great western battle that resulted from those decisions has been covered with marvelous narrative skill by Wiley Sword in Shiloh: Bloody April (New York: Morrow, 1974) and by James Lee McDonough in Shiloh—In Hell Before Night (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). The lengthy and varied operations that finally resulted in the capture of the great Confederate outpost on the Mississippi are narrated in Earl Schenck Miers, The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg (New York: Knopf, 1955), in James R. Arnold, Grant Wins the War: Decision at Vicksburg (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1997), and in Michael Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
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