Russell McClintock’s Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) is an invaluable recent addition to the historiography, meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the fall of Sumter and illustrating the relationship between Northern public opinion and the inner councils of the Lincoln administration.
The compendious collection published by the War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) is an indispensable resource for anyone studying almost any aspect of the conflict.
Michael Burlingame has done more than perhaps any other single scholar to assemble exhaustive information about Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency—in the process also casting light into many other corners of nineteenth-century America. His two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) is a true gold mine, and Burlingame has further earned the gratitude of researchers and readers by posting an unabridged version of the already almost two-thousand-page biography (including his full footnotes) on the website of Knox College’s Lincoln Studies Center.
Philip Paludan’s A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988) is a revealing account of how the Civil War transformed the identity and society of the North. Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff’s A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2007) lucidly portrays the various roles of ordinary American men and women. George M. Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) remains one of the most thoughtful and subtle treatments of American intellectual life in the Civil War era, and of the complicated relationships among poetry, philosophy, and politics.
Prologue: A Banner at Daybreak
Two of the Union officers besieged at Fort Sumter during the winter of 1860–61 left vivid accounts of their experience. Samuel Wylie Crawford’s The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter (New York: C. L. Webster & Co, 1887) not only recounts the events in Charleston Harbor but also puts them in their larger political context, based on information he diligently gathered after the war from both Northern and Southern participants. Crawford’s letters and diary in the Library of Congress provide even more detail. Abner Doubleday’s Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876) is another valuable source, colored somewhat by the author’s own cantankerous personality; it provides the fullest description of the move from Moultrie to Sumter. The first volume of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: The Century Company, 1887) contains other, briefer, eyewitness accounts. The Robert Anderson Papers in the Library of Congress offer many clues to the enigmatic commander’s experience at Sumter, as well as his earlier career, including fan letters, poems, and testimonials that he received from Northerners (and a few Southerners) during the siege.
The story of the Sumter crisis has been narrated many times by later historians. Among the best and most authoritative accounts, Maury Klein’s Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) is notable for its richness of detail and deft interweaving of events in Washington and Charleston. David Detzer’s Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), a fast-paced narrative, provides especially rich portraits of the various participants in the Sumter standoff. W. A. Swanberg’s First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957) offers another well-researched account. Nelson D. Lankford’s Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to the Civil War, 1861 (New York: Viking, 2007) is especially strong in its treatment of the political struggles in the border states during the secession crisis.
For the changing meanings of the American flag, see especially Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer’s The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), as well as Scot M. Guenter’s The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990) and Michael Corcoran’s For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Chapter One: Wide Awake
For Ralph Farnham, see C. W. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill (Boston, 1860); as well as contemporary newspaper accounts. George B. Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, W. W. Norton, 1979) is a provocative and important book that has unfortunately fallen somewhat out of favor; it offers an ingenious interpretation of the complicated feelings that the Civil War generation bore toward its antebellum parents and Revolutionary grandparents.
A magisterial survey of America’s transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century (although it stops a dozen years before the story in this book begins) is Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2008).
There are surprisingly few good secondary sources on the presidential campaign of 1860, especially treating the Lincoln campaign as a grassroots cultural phenomenon rather than simply a product of machinations among Republican leaders. Burlingame’s Lincoln biography, cited above, offers some useful details. Gil Troy’s lively chronicle of American presidential campaigns, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Harvard University Press, 1996), includes a chapter on Lincoln’s two campaigns. See also Wayne C. Williams, A Rail Splitter for President (University of Denver Press, 1951) and William E. Gienapp, “Who Voted for Lincoln?” in John Thomas, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). Henry Mayer’s magnificent All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) portrays not just the great abolitionist himself but also the larger movement of which he was a part.
A superb recent article by Jon Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign,” Journal of American History, vol. 96, no. 2 (September 2009) is, rather amazingly, the only in-depth treatment that the Wide Awakes have ever received.
Donald E. Reynolds’s Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) offers an important (though horrifying) account of racial violence in the Lone Star State and throughout the South in the summer and fall of 1860, a pivotal but hitherto almost ignored factor in fueling the secession crisis.
Chapter Two: The Old Gentlemen
Seven decades after its original publication, Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941) is still a paragon of historical writing, unsurpassed as an account of the nation’s capital just before and during the war. The London Times’s William Howard Russell arrived in Washington just before the attack on Sumter and recorded his impressions (both there and throughout the country) in My Diary North and South (Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1863), a delightfully wicked book. Mrs. Roger Pryor’s gossipy Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1908) vividly recalls antebellum Washington’s social and political circles from the viewpoint of a congressman’s wife. Constance McLaughlin Green’s several books on Washington are rich in detail, with The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 1967) ahead of its time in its portrayal of the local African-American community. Ernest B. Furgurson’s more recent Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) is another good account.
The only full-scale modern biography of John J. Crittenden is Albert D. Kirwan’s sympathetic John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Univers
ity Press of Kentucky, 1962). The senator’s papers in the Library of Congress are an invaluable resource.
Among the many fine books on the run-up to the war, two have particularly shaped my own account. The first of these is Kenneth Stampp’s And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Louisiana State University Press, 1950); the second is David M. Potter’s equally classic The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). For the Peace Conference, see Robert Gray Gunderson’s Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). Gabor S. Borritt, ed., Why the Civil War Came (Oxford University Press, 1996) offers a number of enlightening essays.
Three: Forces of Nature
For Abraham Lincoln’s journey to Washington and his activities and political strategy throughout the interim between his election and his inauguration, Harold Holzer’s Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008) is an authoritative, deeply researched source.
The standard biography of James Garfield is Allan Peskin’s Garfield: A Biography (Kent State University Press, 1978). Margaret Leech was working on a biography at the time of her death in 1974, focusing on the social and political world within which her subject lived; she had gotten as far as the Civil War. The book was finished posthumously by Harry J. Brown (unfortunately in a perfunctory fashion) and published as The Garfield Orbit (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). The best source on Garfield’s early political career is Robert I. Cottom’s “To Be Among the First: The Early Career of James A. Garfield, 1831–1868” (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1975). W. W. Wasson’s James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education. (Nashville: Tennessee Book Co., 1952) and Hendrik Booraem’s The Road to Respectability: James A. Garfield and His World, 1844–1852 (Bucknell University Press, 1988) are useful as well. The Diary of James A. Garfield (Michigan State University Press, 1967), edited by Harry J. Brown and Frederick D. Williams, is a window into Garfield’s intimate thoughts from his teenage years until the end of his life, although unfortunately he did not maintain the diary consistently during the late 1850s and early 1860s. The best published collection of his writings during that period is Mary L. Hinsdale, ed., Garfield-Hinsdale Letters: Correspondence Between James Abram Garfield and Burke Aaron Hinsdale (University of Michigan Press, 1949). The Library of Congress’s immense collection of Garfield’s papers, along with another significant deposit at the Western Reserve Historical Society, contain more information about the twentieth president than almost any historian has ever wanted to know.
The fascinating cultural history of nineteenth-century Ohio (I am aware that this phrase may strike some readers as an oxymoron) unfolds elegantly in a book by Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 2002). For the Civil War in Ohio, see David Van Tassel, “Beyond Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent State University Press, 2006); as well as Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy and the Crisis of Disunion, 1860–1861,” Ohio History, vol. 86, no. 1 (Winter 1977). The most thorough sources on the Disciples movement are Henry K. Shaw, Buckeye Disciples: A History of the Disciples of Christ in Ohio (St. Louis: Christian Board of Publication, 1952); and A. S. Hayden, Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (Cincinnati: Chase & Hall, 1875).
For the prewar Northern ideology of individualism, personal freedom, and egalitarianism, see Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (2nd ed., Fordham University Press, 1997). The classic treatment of the growth of free-soil republicanism and the birth of the Republican Party is Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1995). The cultural underpinnings of the Union cause are explored in James M. McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1997) and in Susan-Mary Grant’s North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (University Press of Kansas, 2000), which is especially incisive in its analysis of how Northerners contrasted their culture to that of the South. Also see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (University Press of Kansas, 2002).
The abolitionist movement in Ohio is chronicled in William Cheek and Annie Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (University of Illinois Press, 1989). Dorothy Sterling’s Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991) is the best biography of that fiery crusader.
Chapter Four: A Shot in the Dark
For sources on Fort Sumter, see under Prologue, above.
Thomas Bartel’s Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010) and JoAnn Smith Bartlett’s Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times: Looking Beyond the Myth (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris Corporation, 2009) are the only two biographies of baseball’s noninventor. Richard Wagner’s For Honor, Flag, and Family: Civil War Major General Samuel W. Crawford, 1827–1892 (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2005) treats Sumter’s surgeon. Edward M. Coffman’s The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (Oxford University Press, 1986) is a vivid and well-analyzed portrayal of that institution.
John G. Nicolay and John Hay’s multivolume Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Company, 1890) traces events leading up to and during the war from the perspective of the two men closest to the president throughout that period.
Joshua Wolf Shenk’s thoughtful and empathetic Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) opens a new window into the soul of the sixteenth president, shedding light on almost every aspect of Lincoln’s life and decision making. William Lee Miller’s President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) traces its subject’s moral and political evolution.
In reconstructing the difficult chronology and interlocking events of the secession crisis, I was aided greatly by Russell McClintock’s recent Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession, cited above.
Chapter Five: The Volunteer
The only relatively modern biography of Elmer Ellsworth is Ruth Painter Randall’s lively Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and First Hero of the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), which is carefully researched and well written but unfortunately not footnoted. Charles Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth and the Zouaves of ’61 (University of Chicago Press, 1925) and Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” in Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, both contain useful information and lengthy passages from period sources.
On the cultural history of youth in nineteenth-century America, see Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton University Press, 1999); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 2006).
Marcus Cunliffe’s Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) is a subtle, learned, and colorful exploration of Americans’ ambivalent attitudes toward war and the military. See also James B. Whisker, The Rise and Decline of the American Militia System (Susquehanna University Press, 1999).
Michael Burlingame, in Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), collects a number of articles that provide glimpses of Wa
shington during the first weeks of the war, from someone close to both Lincoln and Ellsworth. Burlingame also edited At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and, with John R. Turner Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999)—both offer further accounts by Lincoln’s voluble private secretary—as well as With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Chapter Six: Gateways to the West
For the building of the transcontinental telegraph, see James Gamble, “Wiring a Continent,” The Californian, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1881); also Carlyle N. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” (master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1937); the growth of Western Union is covered in Robert Luther Thompson’s Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1947). The most reliable account of the Pony Express is Christopher Corbett’s myth-busting Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). See also John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (University of Illinois Press, 1979).
Pamela Herr provides the best account of Jessie Frémont’s life in Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987). Herr also edited, with Mary Lee Spence, The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (University of Illinois Press, 1993), a lively collection of correspondence. For John C. Frémont’s life and career, see Tom Chaffin’s fine biography, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), along with Allan Nevins’s classic Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (University of Nebraska Press, 1992; originally published 1928). Sally Denton’s Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007) is an engaging joint biography.
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