After Lincoln


Book Description

A brilliant evocation of the post-Civil War era by the acclaimed author of Patriots and Union 1812. After Lincoln tells the story of the Reconstruction, which set back black Americans and isolated the South for a century. With Lincoln’s assassination, his “team of rivals,” in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s phrase, was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson’s policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln’s closest ally, seemed to waver. By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, “I’m afraid I’m elected.” His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by post-war greed and corruption. Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by the Radical Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.




Library Notes


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The Cumulative Book Index


Book Description

A world list of books in the English language.













Civil War - Part 2 (eBook)


Book Description

Civil War-Part II contains 12 full-color PowerPoint slides, 28 reproducible pages including five pages of test material, and a richly detailed teacher's guide. Among the topics covered in this volume are Union strategy, the battle of Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, General Grant, Sherman's march to the sea, Lincoln's reelection, and Appomattox.




Raw Generals and Green Soldiers


Book Description

The eleven years of conflict that engulfed Ireland (1641-53) can be seen as a drama in three acts, each of which drew Ireland into progressively closer alignment with the Civil Wars (1642-52) in the other two Stuart kingdoms, Scotland and England. The first act in the Wars of Religion in Ireland (1641-53) began in October 1641 with a rising in Ulster and shuddered to a halt in September 1643 when the insurgents, now embodied as the Confederate Catholics, agreed a ceasefire with Charles I’s representative in Ireland. This study is confined to Act One to manage its sheer scope and scale. Not a single county in Ireland was unscathed by war and in summer 1642 there were more men under arms than there ever had been or would be again. Moreover, Act One was singularly nasty. Insurgent slaughter of Protestant settlers in the winter of 1641-42 quickly gained canonical status. English and Scots armies routinely massacred natives in the spring and summer that followed. After their uprising failed, the Irish in 1642 were attacked by English and Scottish armies that were bigger, in aggregate, than any before or since. And that includes the armies of Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange. Lacking munitions, forced to disperse their strength, and usually outfought in open battle, the Confederate Catholics pushed back in war-as-process and food-fights in which castles dominating a chequerboard of hinterlands jostled with hostile neighbors. The Catholics were winning this small war when the music stopped in 1643. This is a study of the Catholic armies in Act One through a succinct narrative which reveals underlying pattern and purpose in what would otherwise be one apparently random battle, siege, skirmish, massacre, and cattle raid after another, devoid of form or meaning. The narrative focuses in and out, from the strategic through the operational down to the tactical and what happened in a particular place on a given day. The narrative also shifts from the southern or Leinster/Munster theater to the northern or Connacht/Ulster theater. Meaning is disclosed through narrative in which the strengths and shortcomings of the Irish armies become clearer. The quotation in the title sets up two such shortcomings, of leaders and led. One reason why the Catholics lost so many battles may be that their generals fought battles when they needn’t have, showed a fatal preference for the all-out attack, and did not always deploy in a manner that let their army’s components, pike, shot and horse act in mutual support. Another reason may be that the rankers were less invested in the Catholic cause than their officers. But the establishing quotation is followed by a question mark. Perhaps the real question to be asked is how the Catholic armies achieved so much rather than why they failed.