Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

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