History Commons^™

What If The South Had Won The Civil War? 4 Sci-Fi Scenarios For Hbo's 'Confederate', Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections. (excerpt)

Decoration Days And Memorial Days, John M. Rudy

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

By the time he came to Adams County in 1909, John Esch had been a Wisconsin representative to the U.S. House of Representatives for two decades. But today was not just any ordinary day in the life of a congressman. Esch came to speak in the Soldiers' National Cemetery; it was Memorial Day. "Except for the difference in the number here," the Gettysburg Times noted after a note on shrinking attendance, "Memorial Day 1909 was little difference from those of former years." (excerpt)

A Springfield Education, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Politicians have never been shy about writing about themselves, even when it seemed that all they could expect from the public was a polite nod. The Civil War era abounded in such political selfies, among them George W. Julian’s Political Recollections 1840 to 1872, John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet, David Turpie’s Sketches of My Own Times, Albert Riddle’s Recollections of War Times: Reminiscences of Men and Events in Washington, 1860–1865, Alexander McClure’s Recollections of Half a Century, and, of course, Ulysses S. Grant’s Complete Personal Memoirs. [ …

Commentary: 14th Amendment Laid Foundation Of Civil Liberties, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

They had just glued the world back together, and within a year it was threatening to come apart again.

That might sound like a description of the Arab Spring, or even the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, it's what happened 150 years ago in the United States. [excerpt]

Great Emancipator Was Radical Of His Day: Lincoln Opposed Economic Injustice, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1864. “I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”

Yet there has always been doubt about just how great an emancipator he really was. Why did he wait for two years into his presidency to issue his Emancipation Proclamation? And why didn’t that Proclamation free all the 3.9 million African-Americans then held in bondage? [excerpt]

What If Abraham Lincoln Had Lived?, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The lead .41-calibre bullet with which John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, was the most lethal gunshot in American history. Only five days earlier, the main field army of the Southern Confederacy had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and the four dreary years of civil war were yielding to a spring of national rebirth. But by then, the man to whom everyone looked for guidance in reconstructing the nation was dead. [excerpt]

Slavery's End Deserves A 150th Celebration, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War winds down toward its conclusion in the spring, it's difficult not to look back on the four years of this sesquicentennial and wonder why it all seemed so lackluster. Unlike the centennial in 1961-65, Congress decided not to create a national commission. And President Obama took a pass on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

But the most surprisingly lackluster remembrance was the one that just slipped by us - the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States. [excerpt …

Democracy And Nobility, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Americans love revolutions. Our national identity began with a revolution, and a revolutionary war that lasted for eight years; and we cheer on other people’s revolutions, as though we find satisfaction in multiplying our own. “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “No country should be long without one.” An excited James Garfield, in his maiden speech in the House of Representatives in 1864, asked whether his colleagues “forget that the Union had its origin in revolution.” Ralph Waldo …

The Political War, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Pity Abraham Lincoln. Everything that should have gone right for the Union cause in the spring of 1864 had, in just a few weeks, gone defiantly and disastrously wrong.

For two years, the 16th president had toiled uphill against the secession of the Confederate states, against the incompetence of his luckless generals and against his howling critics from both sides of the congressional aisle. Finally, in the summer and fall of 1863, the course of the war had begun to turn his way. Two great victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg staggered the Confederates, and those were followed by a knockdown …

"Public Sentiment Is Everything": Abraham Lincoln And The Power Of Public Opinion, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Since Abraham Lincoln’s death, generations of Americans have studied his life, presidency, and leadership, often remaking him into a figure suited to the needs and interests of their own time. This illuminating volume takes a different approach to his political thought and practice. Here, a distinguished group of contributors argue that Lincoln’s relevance today is best expressed by rendering an accurate portrait of him in his own era. They seek to understand Lincoln as he understood himself and as he attempted to make his ideas clear to his contemporaries. What emerges is a portrait of a prudent leader …

Lincoln And Liberty, Too, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1864. And surely, from Lincoln of all people, that statement must come as a surprise, and for two reasons. In the first place, no one in American history might be said to have been a more shining example of liberty than Abraham Lincoln. Not only had he exercised liberty to its fullest extent, rising from poverty and obscurity to become the 16th president of the United States, but in the process he became the Great Emancipator of over three million slaves, and if anyone …

A New Birth Of Freedom, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The president of the United States had been more than usually agitated ever since the news of a major collision of the Union and Confederate armies around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, first flew along the telegraph wires to the War Department on July 1, 1863. For days, he was clouded with “sadness and despondency” until the message arrived, announcing a great victory for the Union. That was followed almost at once by news from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles: another dispatch had come in, “communicating the fall of Vicksburg [Mississippi] on the fourth of July.” At once, Abraham Lincoln’s mood changed, …

Lincoln And Justice For All, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of …

Does Lincoln Still Belong To The Ages?, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Edwin M. Stanton gets only a footnote in John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but the phrase is one that many know by heart, words this normally irascible and overbearing powder-keg of a man uttered at Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed: “Now he belongs to the ages.” That, at least, was how John Hay recorded Stanton’s words. Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, who had been boosted awkwardly from the stage to the presidential box in Ford’s Theatre and who accompanied the dying Lincoln across Tenth Street to the Petersen House’s back bedroom, thought that Stanton had said, “He now belongs to the ages.” James …

Book Review: Lincoln And His Books, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“I have found no one to speak of Lincoln as a man of either capacity or patriotism,” smirked Confederate general Lafayette McLaws, as the Army of Northern Virginia prepared to march into Pennsylvania on June 28, 1863. His was not, unhappily, an opinion limited to Abraham Lincoln’s enemies-in-arms. Henry Clay Whitney admitted that, at best, Lincoln “had the appearance of a rough intelligent farmer.” Elihu Washburne agreed: meeting Lincoln on the railroad platform in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 1861, Washburne could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns of …

"The Most Awful Problem That Any Nation Ever Undertook To Solve": Reconstruction As A Crisis In Citizenship, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Reconstruction is the step-child of the Civil War, the black hole of American history. It lacks the conflict and the personalities that make the Civil War so colorful; it also lacks the climactic feuds and battles, and dissipates into a confusing and wearisome tale of lost opportunities, squalid victories, and embarrassing defeats whose ultimate endpoint is the great American disgrace - Jim Crow. It lives with the short end of the historical stick for accomplishing too much, then accomplishing too little, with the result that almost the worst thing that can be said about someone in American history is that …

A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic …

Abraham Lincoln And The Development Of The "War Powers" Of The Presidency, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

By conferring on the President the title of "commander in chief," the Constitution created an awkward and undefined area of presidential prerogative. The first President to have to confront this ambiguity was Abraham Lincoln, who developed a presidential "war powers" doctrine based on his presidential oath, the Constitution's "republican guarantee," and the necessity imposed by the novelty of a civil war. This doctrine was seriously contested in Lincoln's time by both Congress and the judiciary, and it continues to be an unresolved constitutional question in the present. But Lincoln's use of such war powers is one demonstration of how a …

"Sublime In Its Magnitude": The Emancipation Proclamation, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had officially gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and the proposed Thirteenth Amendment had become a campaign issue. Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment captures these historic times, profiling the individuals, events, and enactments that led to slavery’s abolition. Fifteen leading Lincoln scholars contribute to this collection, covering slavery from its roots in 1619 Jamestown, through the adoption of the Constitution, to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. [From the Publisher]

Restoring The Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln, Confiscation, And Emancipation In The Civil War Era, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Like the business cycle, the reputations of great actors in history seem to go through alternating periods of boom and bust. Harry Truman was scorned in his day as an incompetent bumbler. A half-century later, he is regarded as a gutsy and principled president. Andrew Jackson was hailed as the champion of the common man and the enemy of power-mad bankers. Since the 1970s, he has become the champion only of the White man, a rancid hater of Indians, and a leering political monstrosity. John Quincy Adams was, for more than a century after his death, dismissed as a dyspeptic …

How Abe Lincoln Lost The Black Vote: Lincoln And Emancipation In The African American Mind, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

No other American president has wielded the power of words with greater skill than Abraham Lincoln. "No one can read Mr. Lincoln's state papers without perceiving in them a most remarkable facility of 'putting things' so as to command the attention and assent of the people," wrote Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times in 1864, and Raymond had an editor's unerring eye for this sort of thing. Massachusetts congressman George Boutwell, reminiscing for Allen Thorndike Rice twenty years after Lincoln's death, thought that "Lincoln's fame" would "be carried along the ages" by his writings, and especially the …

Lincoln On The Abolition Of Slavery, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln's long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He was always calculating, and always planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." And in no other pursuit was Lincoln more ambitious than in politics. As a lawyer and Whig political organizer in Illinois, "Politics were his life and his ambition and his motive power." [excerpt]

Understanding Emancipation: Lincoln's Proclamation And The Overthrow Of Slavery, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The most common trope that governs understanding of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation is that of progress. The variations on that trope are legion, and they include notions of Lincoln's journey toward emancipation, his growth in understanding the justice of emancipation, and his path to the Emancipation Proclamation. "Lincoln was," as Horace Greeley put it, "a growing man"; growing from a stance of moral indifference and ignorance at the time of his election in 1860 toward deep conviction about African American freedom by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation less than two years later. That was a generous sentiment, since it …

Holland's Informants: The Construction Of Josiah Holland's 'Life Of Abraham Lincoln', Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Abraham Lincoln's coffin had lain in the receiving vault in Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery for less than three weeks when a dapper, walrus-mustachioed New Englander stepped off the train and checked into Springfield's St. Nicholas Hotel. He was Josiah Gilbert Holland, one-time editor (and still part owner) of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, a nationally popular writer of advice books, and (what would turn out to be most memorably) part of a small circle of admirers and encouragers of an unknown Amherst poet named Emily Dickinson. None of those attributes, however, provided the slightest qualification for the task that brought …

Book Review: The Rise And Fall Of The American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics And The Onset Of The Civil War By Michael Holt, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

"An impartial history of American statesmanship will give some of its most brilliant chapters to the Whig party from 1830 to 1850," wrote James G. Blaine in his memoirs. This was not, unhappily, because of a great heritage of political achievement in American public life. The work of the Whigs was, as Blaine admitted, negative and restraining rather than constructive. Still, "if their work cannot be traced in the National statute books as prominently as that of their opponents, they will be credited by the discriminating reader of our political annals as the English of to-day credit Charles James Fox …

Apple Of Gold In A Picture Of Silver: The Constitution And Liberty, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

In the threatening winter of 1861, as the United States was being ~ inched ever- closer td the outbreak of civil war by the secession of the Southern states over the issue of black slavery, the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, opened up a confidential correspondence with a f6rmer Southern political colleague, Alexander Stephens of Georgia. Stephens had made headlines in November 1860, in a speech to the Georgia legislature, urging Georgia not to follow tlie South into secession. Lincoln sent him a friendly note, asking- for a printed copy of the speech-and perhaps warming Stephens to an invitation to …

Come-Outers And Community Men: Abraham Lincoln And The Idea Of Community In Nineteenth-Century America, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The most eloquent and moving words Abraham Lincoln ever uttered about any community were those "few and simple words" he spoke on the rear platform of the railroad car that lay waiting on the morning of February 11, 1861, to take him to Washington, to the presidency, and ultimately to his death. As his "own breast heaved with emotion" so that "he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence" (in the description of James C. Conkling), Lincoln declared that "No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting." To leave Springfield was to …

Holland's Life Of Abraham Lincoln, Josiah Gilbert Holland, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

"Soon after the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865, newspaper editor Josiah Gilbert Holland traveled to Illinois to talk with people who had known Abraham Lincoln “back when.” In 1866 Holland published the earliest full-scale life of the fallen leader. A great popular success, Holland’s biography introduced American readers who were hungry for personal information about Lincoln’s early life to some of the most famous and enduring Lincoln stories. From Holland the reader learned about Lincoln making restitution for a ruined book, the railsplitter earning his first silver dollar, the millhorse’s kick to his head, the wrestling match with …

Abraham Lincoln And The Doctrine Of Necessity, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Abraham Lincoln was a fatalist. That, at least, was what he told many people over the course of his life. "I have all my life been a fatalist," Lincoln informed his Illinois congressional ally, Isaac Arnold. "Mr. Lincoln was a fatalist," remembered Henry Clay Whitney, one of his Springfield law clerks, "he believed ... that the universe is governed by one uniform, unbroken, primordial law." His Springfield law partner William Henry Herndon, likewise, affirmed that Lincoln "believed in predestination, foreordination, that all things were fixed, doomed one way or the other, from which there was no appeal." Even Mary Todd …

Book Review: The Presidency Of Abraham Lincoln, By Phillip Shaw Paludan, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Americans have had a highly complex love-hate relationship with politics, especially with political ideology. Recent books on the state of American politics underscore the resentment Americans feel at governments that have grown bloated and indifferent. And the groundswell of complaints about congressional "gridlock" and budgetary "train wrecks" seems to show that Americans are particularly impatient with political ideologues who insist on letting their philosophies, economics, or values get in the way of consensus and problem solving. Yet tumbling out of every newspaper, radio, and television, now as never before in this generation, is evidence of Americans' possession by political polarizations …