Abraham Lincoln
Page 17
And so to secondary sources on Lincoln’s war. Gabor S. Borritt has published a fascinating collection of essays, Lincoln’s Generals, 1994, to which he himself contributed the essay “Lincoln, Meade and Gettysburg.” Other contributors are Mark E. Neely, Stephen W. Sears, Michael Fellman, and John Y. Simon. Again, here are all Lincoln’s most incisive lines on military matters, and here too the prevarications of McClellan and Hooker, the doggedness of Grant, the ruthless, coruscating flourishes of Sherman. Henry Steele Commager’s The Blue and the Gray (2 volumes), 1973, and James M. McPherson’s The Battle-Cry of Freedom, New York, 1988, were sources of detail and overview. The latter, however, is more than mere military history—it places the war in its social, cultural, and political context, and seems to this lay writer to be a superbly comprehensive work.
There are innumerable works on individual commanders and battles, a few of which could be named here as having contributed to this work. Clarence E. N. Macartney’s Grant and His Generals, New York, 1953, gives a picture of the way U. S. Grant fought his remarkable, stubborn war to the end. Stephen W. Sears tells the story of the Peninsula Campaign in To the Gates of Richmond, 1992, of Antietam in Landscape Turned Red, 1983, and of Chancellorsville in Chancellorsville, 1996. Various works originally consulted for an earlier book of mine, American Scoundrel, were also useful here. These happened to include Julia Lorrilard Saffort Butterfield’s A Biographical Memorial of General Daniel Butterfield, 1904; Theodore Ayrault Dodge’s The Campaign of Chancellorsville, Boston, 1881; The Second Day at Gettysburg, edited by Gary W. Gallagher, 1993; and Walter Herbert’s Fighting Joe Hooker, New York, 1944. Henry Edwin Tremain’s Two Days of War: A Gettysburg Narrative, 1905, follows the experience of Sickles’s III Corps at Gettysburg, and Regis de Trobriand’s Four Years with the Army of the Potomac, 1889, the memoir of an officer who rose to the rank of general in that corps, certainly contributed to whatever background authenticity the account of Lincoln’s war possesses.