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

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). The 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).

A number of published papers and diaries of Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries offer critical glimpses into the operation of wartime politics at the highest levels in the North, beginning with The Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. John T. Morse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), The Diary of Edward Bates 1859–1866, ed. Howard K. Beale (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), and David Donald’s edition of Salmon Chase’s wartime diaries, Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954). The diaries and papers of Lincoln’s wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, have been exhaustively edited by Michael Burlingame as Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The best surveys of the Republican domestic