Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Volume 2)
Language: English
Pages: 1048
ISBN: 1421410583
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the first multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln to be published in decades, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame offers a fresh look at the life of one of America’s greatest presidents. Incorporating the field notes of earlier biographers, along with decades of research in multiple manuscript archives and long-neglected newspapers, this remarkable work will both alter and reinforce current understanding of America’s sixteenth president.
In volume 2, Burlingame examines Lincoln’s presidency and the trials of the Civil War. He supplies fascinating details on the crisis over Fort Sumter and the relentless office seekers who plagued Lincoln. He introduces readers to the president’s battles with hostile newspaper editors and his quarrels with incompetent field commanders. Burlingame also interprets Lincoln’s private life, discussing his marriage to Mary Todd, the untimely death of his son Willie to disease in 1862, and his recurrent anguish over the enormous human costs of the war.
and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong.”189 In his magazine, Curtis was more formal but no less laudatory: “While many Presidents of many parties would have endeavored to save the Government by force of arms, not all Presidents would so clearly comprehend or so simply state what the Government was that they were saving. This Government was founded upon the rights of man; and for the first time in long years the President recognizes that fact.
those who are as good as himself.”308 In New York, the Tribune spoke dismissively of the president’s “crazy scheme.”309 Even the conservative Herald declared that there “is no necessity for it.” The editor of that paper voiced a widely shared practical objection: “the labor of the negroes is needed in the cotton and sugar States. The labor of the white man cannot supply it; and it would be extreme folly to deprive the country of such an immense laboring population.”310 Many blacks indignantly
but nowadays “the advantages of such an alliance are unblushingly discussed.” Secret groups plotted to overthrow the government. “Denunciation of New England is indulged in, and an open avowal that a union leaving her out, would be preferable to the ‘old union.’ ” It was “unaccountable that a government possessed of the resources that ours is, with loyal and patriotic local governments in the union states, should have made so little progress in putting down this rebellion.”231 A Bostonian
city.” The general-in-chief pooh-poohed the idea, insisting that troops “could do nothing after they got there.” Even though Fox seconded Lincoln’s proposal, Halleck continued to demur. According to Noah Brooks, “though he treated the suggestions of Lincoln with respect,” Halleck “evidently entertained a profound contempt for his generalship.”126 (On another occasion, when “absolutely insulted” by Halleck, Lincoln allegedly “resolved to [re]move” him for such an “act of personal indignity.” But
program intended by the democratic party but that will result in the dismemberment of the Union.” When they objected that George McClellan would probably be the Democratic nominee and that he was “in favor of crushing out the rebellion,” Lincoln replied that the “slightest acquaintance with arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the north to do it. There are now between 1 & 200 thousand black men