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

policy agenda during the war are Heather Cox Richardson’s The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Michael Green’s Freedom, Union and Power: Lincoln and His Party in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Salmon Chase’s decision to invite Jay Cooke to act as the Treasury’s wartime agent was of greater significance to the long-term Union victory than a number of battles, and is described in detail by Ellis Oberholtzer in Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907). The war involved not only economic and political difficulties but also legal and constitutional problems for the Union, most of which are surveyed in J. G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), Harold Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1973), Brian McGinty, Lincoln and the Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Robert Bruce Murray, Legal Cases of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003) and Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The particular problems posed by the blockade have been searchingly analyzed by Ludwell H. Johnson, “The Confederacy: What Was It? A View from the Federal Courts,” in Civil War History 32 (March 1986), and Johnson’s article on the Prize Cases, “Abraham Lincoln and the Development of Presidential War-Making Powers: Prize Cases (1863) Revisited,” in Civil War History 35 (September 1989).

The fires set in the rear of the Union cause by Democratic and Copperhead dissent have been the particular object of the late Frank L. Klement’s attention in a series of volumes, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), and Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). Klement entered a strong skepticism about the legitimacy of Lincoln’s concerns; by contrast, Mark Neely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) offers a comprehensive rebuttal to wartime charges that Lincoln wantonly disregarded the civil rights of dissenters and Democrats and imposed a quasi-dictatorship on the North, while Jennifer L. Weber’s Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) is a spirited defense of Lincoln’s worries about Copperhead dissent.

SIX. THE SOLDIER’S TALE

In 1886, the onetime Federal artilleryman Frank Wilkeson was growing disgusted with the flood of Civil War memoirs flowing from the pens of former generals who sought chiefly “to belittle the work of others, or to falsify or obscure it.” He sat down to write his own recollections of service in the Army of the Potomac in 1864 and 1865 to give a voice to “the private soldiers who won the battles, when they were given a fair chance to win them,” and who “have scarcely begun to write the history from their point of view.” Wilkeson himself may have done some self-embroidery of his service in the 11th New York Artillery, but his preference for writing the Civil War from the bottom up has been pursued in a seemingly unending flood of regimental histories (some of which appeared even before the war was over), published diaries, and collections of private letters edited by descendants and scholars of the Civil War soldier. The richness of these sources is due largely to the conjunction of two events: one is the mass movement of American males into the war, and the other is the rising tide of literacy in the American population in the nineteenth century. Americans were clearly confronted with a public event of crisis proportions in their national life, and for the first time in the history of the republic, an overwhelming number of those Americans were literate enough to record their thoughts and descriptions of it.

The most obvious primary source for the ordinary life of the Civil War soldier is the regimental history, which developed between 1885 and 1910 into what amounts to a major genre of American literature. One of the earliest, and arguably the liveliest, of these “regimentals” is Amos Judson’s History of the Eighty-Third Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers (Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1986 [1865]), which was published shortly after the end of the war. Free from many of the conventions which later shackled and then strangled the regimental history, Judson’s volume bristles with cracker-barrel wit and a keen reporter’s eye for the foibles of the American character. After Judson came a string of regimental histories, running out to nearly 800 published volumes. Until 1910, when the soldiers of the Civil War generation began passing swiftly from the scene, most regimental histories were written by survivors of the regiments themselves. But after the Civil War centennial in the 1960s, the regimental history was reborn as a historical genre. The engine of this rebirth was John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957), and it proceeded to blossom into numerous great unit histories, such as James I. Robertson’s The Stonewall Brigade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963) and Alan Nolan’s The Iron Brigade: A Military History (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1975). Another genre closely related to the regimental history is the volume of collected war letters. Oliver W. Norton’s Army Letters, 1861–1865 (Chicago: O. L. Deming, 1903) is one of the best examples of such collections, coming directly from the editorial hand of the soldier who wrote them. Most often, however, these collections have been discovered in archives or among family heirlooms and have been reconstructed and edited by modern scholars or archivists. A model for such a modern collection is the assemblage of letters of Edward King Wightman in From Antietam to