Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President. By Kathryn Canavan. Photos, notes, index, bibliography, 248 pp., 2018. University Press of Kentucky, www.kentuckypress.com. $19.95 paperback.
Reviewed by Joseph Truglio
Lincoln’s assassination is perhaps the most studied and written-about aspect of his life. One wonders what new information can be uncovered in yet another book.
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In a relatively short volume the author presents a unique take on various events leading up to the calamity, the event itself and the aftermath. The story unfolds in 25 chapters, each covering a particular aspect. An epilogue presents short biographies of major participants. At only 183 pages of text we get a broad overview rather than a typical micro-managed presentation. An ample bibliography gives readers good sources for further research.
I found this to be a unique effort in the plethora of Lincoln books. It seemed to me to be targeting an audience of novice students. It is simple in style and the information is not cluttered with detail. I must admit I did garner several nuggets of information, particularly about the Peterson family. It does have appeal to the more seasoned student.
Overall, I found this to be a worthy effort—easy to read and full of information. I highly recommend that you get a copy for a young student and put him or her on the path to discovering a defining moment in American history.
The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America. By Erik Mathisen. Images, notes, bibliography, index, 240 pp., 2018. University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org. $34.95 cloth.
Who qualifies as a citizen? How is citizenship determined? Can one lose citizenship? If so, how does one get it back? How closely related are the ideas of loyalty and citizenship? The answers to these questions continue to evolve in American politics and society. However, few if any periods in American history had a greater impact on who is considered a citizen and what that means than the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Legally recognized citizenship has presented obstacles to traditionally marginalized individuals over the years. For example, at one period in American history only white property-owning males had citizenship status. And even then, elements of citizenship remained fuzzy as far as state-versus-nation loyalty and sovereignty. Obviously, citizenship has come to include many different groups of people in the years since the Civil War. However, much of that change had its foundation in the crucible of the conflict.
The Loyal Republic: In Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America, Erik Mathisen uses the Mississippi Valley as his geographical area of focus. That region is an excellent choice due to all of the change it experienced during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Although Mississippi was the second state to secede, there were pockets where loyalty to the United States remained strong, and it was home to individuals who were unwilling to claim allegiance to the newly formed Confederacy. This situation presented intriguing issues. Among those that did side with secession, the author examines the murky world of whether one’s greater loyalty was to the state of Mississippi or to the emerging Confederate nation. On the surface this may seem one and the same, but various issues arose that hardened those lines and often made for difficult situations for many.
Mathisen explains that this era brought previously unavailable opportunities for African Americans to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. By fleeing their owners and entering Union lines, either to provide labor or enlist as soldiers when finally allowed to do so, they opened new doors toward citizenship. Blacks would ultimately use their loyalty during the Civil War as a leverage point in Reconstruction’s initial years. The formerly enslaved, especially those who had fought in USCT regiments, demanded recognition as citizens as reward for their service and sacrifice. Those demands were realized in the form of Constitutional amendments (14th & 15th), which in turn bred resentment among former Confederates.
One area that Mathisen could have probed further is the idea of fluid allegiances and what those meant in terms of one’s citizenship. It would make for fascinating analysis to examine those areas of the Mississippi Valley that were initially under state and Confederate control but fell to Union occupation, and how residents’ loyalty followed prevailing authority. It would have been equally intriguing to examine how those who exercised a fluid allegiance during
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the war were later received in their home communities during Reconstruction.
The Loyal Republic is a well-researched, thought-provoking, and timely work that makes one reexamine preconceptions of loyalty and citizenship and how we came to our current understanding of those terms. With Americans presently debating hot issues like immigration reform, entitlement rights, voter regulation and other citizenship-related concerns, it is important to understand the history of citizenship and how it has evolved over time. Joining other important works such as Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) and Paul Shifting Grounds: Quigley’s Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (2011), The Loyal Republic is a significant addition to the growing list of scholarship on this topic.
Tim Talbott is the Director of Education, Interpretation, Visitor Services, and Collections at Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, Va. He is currently researching the various combination of elements that led to emancipation.
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Reviewed by William Harris Bragg
For quite some time a brief, balanced history of Reconstruction has been needed—a short, judicious monograph that synthesizes previous scholarship to the satisfaction of objective historians, but also remains accessible to the educated general public. Although this is not that book, it will probably enjoy respectable sales—for it is indeed concise, as well as inexpensive and handsomely packaged. But, alas, this title will also no doubt be widely adopted as a college text, since it features scholarly trappings and (most important for university assignment) exceptionally correct political ideology.
Guelzo’s book appears three decades after the publication of Eric Foner’s revisionist classic, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988). Like most revisionist Reconstruction historians since the late 1980s, Guelzo belongs to what may now be termed the Foner school of Reconstruction historiography— university scholars who have followed Foner’s lead in attempting to obliterate the Dunning school histories of the early 20th century.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the idea of Dunning and Foner schools—both take their names from eminent Columbia University professors linked with Reconstruction history. And the Foner school (building on previous revisionist works) has now enjoyed a three-decade ascendancy. This period is comparable to the inaugural thirty-year span between William A. Dunning’s first major Reconstruction title in 1897 and 1927, by which year all of the Dunning scholars’ Southern State Studies had been published.
In opposing the Dunningites, Guelzo and the other Fonerites applaud Congressional Reconstruction, celebrate Radicals of all sorts, display conspicuous hostility toward the conquered white South, and ensconce the freed slaves at the valorized center of their accounts. Unlike the Dunning school’s first three decades---which saw other interpretations published, as well as spirited attacks from various historians—the Foner school has received practically unanimous peer approval and has been imitated repeatedly.
Nonetheless, as a 30th anniversary recapitulation of Foner school Reconstruction orthodoxy, Guelzo’s book seems malapropos, even beyond the lèse-majesté of competing directly with Foner’s 2015 abridgement of his school’s 1988 urtext. That opus, whatever else might be said of it, rested on monumental print and manuscript research at widespread repositories. In comparison, Guelzo uses only readily available printed primary sources and secondary works and makes no pretense of doing more. Such an approach works best when the author steeps himself in an abundance of such sources and displays his mastery of them.
But there is often something of a dilettante’s view to Guelzo’s survey, a suggestion of sources glanced at hastily and sometimes read and quoted carelessly. And, despite its brevity, the book is neither tightly focused nor closely edited.
Mistakes are frequent. For examples, in a sampling of erroneous references to Georgia alone, Guelzo has the Empire State reconstructed twice rather than its record three times and makes its scalawag Republican governor a carpetbagger (or, to use Guelzo’s euphemism, a “missionary of free labor”). One of the book’s many images of white-on-black atrocities (five appear on the dust jacket alone) comes from an 1872 memoir of abolitionist-turned-planter Charles Stearns: a crude sketch of election-day skullduggery in Columbia County, where it happened (and showing accurately the county seat structures of the time) is wrongly ascribed to Taylor County, some 130 miles distant. Additionally, readers are told that in Mitchell County “five cases of Henry rifles were used by local Democrats to attack a Republican rally in Camilla, killing nine”—a gross mischaracterization of the incident, as well as a misreading of the source. But at least this source can be located through its endnote, unlike an 1867 letter written by novelist and Georgia native Augusta Jane Evans, quoted for displaying her “gendered disdain” for the free-labor North.
Although his works principally proclaim Guelzo to be a diligent miner of the Lincoln Lode, he nonetheless cannot be charged with unfamiliarity with the period’s major sources; this book actually marks the third time Guelzo has published a brief history of Reconstruction. His earlier surveys appeared in two differently titled but textually similar 1995 and 2012 accounts of the Civil War and its aftermath. In both books the war receives the lion’s share of coverage, but the briefer Reconstruction sections are suitably Fonerite. For the new book, the two earlier narratives have been recast, although all three surveys feature one favored metaphor: the transformation of Revisionist arch-villain Andrew Johnson from the “Moses” of the freed people into their “Pharaoh.”
In the freshest interpretation of his latest book, Guelzo imagines Reconstruction as a “bourgeois revolution,” a tentative and poorly developed concept that nonetheless imports into the book both class analysis and the vital word “revolution.” This coinage also allows the author to share his image of what the South’s post-Civil War period should have been: “a Unionapproved narrative of triumphant embourgeoisment.”
Obviously, Guelzo concurs with Foner’s assertion that “Even more than most historical endeavors, writing the history of Reconstruction has always been a political task as well as a scholarly one.” In fact, so conspicuously does Guelzo belong to the left-leaning Foner school that many of David Donald’s comments regarding Foner’s 1988 book serve just as well for Guelzo’s 2018 offering. Both books “overidealize the black community” and are “so lacking in sympathy for all Southern whites that their problems receive none of the thoughtful analysis and sympathetic understanding... [given] to issues that confronted blacks. Readers... will not understand that most ex-Confederates were not involved in the lynchings, terrorism, and Ku Klux Klan vigilantism... to which [the author] devotes so much attention. Instead, they lived hardscrabble lives, attempting to restore a region devastated by war.”
Nonetheless, Guelzo occasionally declares his independence from Foner—he returns the beginning date of Reconstruction to 1865 from Foner’s 1863, and his narrative organization is more strictly chronological than Foner’s.
But two chronological disruptions occur. First, legal and constitutional issues receive their own chapter late in the book, rather than being effectively integrated within the text, as in Guelzo’s two earlier looks at Reconstruction. Second, the author unaccountably delays description of the South’s chaotic, devastated postbellum condition until his third chapter, covering March 1867-May 1868, and thereby delays giving context for white Southerners’ thoughts and actions during the two years after Appomattox.
Moreover, where the conquered white South is concerned, Guelzo seems even more ruthless than others of the Foner school. To bring the South into acceptability, he toys with such ideas as implanting “a New England-style high type of culture” in the region, and of assuring Union loyalty by importing workers and voters from the North. But, in particular, Guelzo wishes on the region’s population a more stringent and prolonged period of military rule. Had the former Confederacy been kept longer under heavy heel, he argues, Reconstruction would not have been “overthrown, subverted, and betrayed.”
Guelzo further contends that the victorious North’s unwise leniency toward the fallen Confederacy was repeated disastrously in later centuries, when the United States failed to impose “lengthy and expensive occupations” on Germany after the Great War and on Iraq after the two Gulf Wars. With this comparison, Guelzo highlights his opinion of the defeated South’s wickedness.
In the three decades between Foner’s and Guelzo’s books on Reconstruction, little has changed in the ruling academic left’s view of America’s postbellum period. And there seems little reason to hope for a detached and responsible account of Reconstruction to emerge in the next thirty years— particularly since Guelzo’s presentist, fully politicized study has now been issued by the world’s largest university press.
William Harris Bragg, of Gray, Georgia, wrote the Introduction to a new (2017) edition of Reconstruction in Georgia by C. Mildred Thompson (one of Dunning’s students). His publications center on the U.S. Middle Period. Among them, De Renne (1999), traces a Savannah planter family through the Civil War and Reconstruction. “The Junius of Georgia Redemption: The ‘Nemesis’ Letters of Thomas M. (Georgia Historical Norwood” Quarterly, Spring 1993) deals with the 1871 collapse of Radical rule in Georgia.
Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship that Changed America (New York, 2005).
Twain finally finished Huckleberry Finn in 1883, after nine years of off-and-on again writing. Disappointed with the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Twain decided to have Charley Webster publish his new book. Twain gave Webster his manuscript, “with strict instructions,” as Perry writes, “that the book could be issued only after a large number of copies had actually been sold.” Thus Twain was talking with Grant about the general’s memoirs when he was working hard to get his own book published.
After Twain left Grant’s New York City home on Nov. 20, Grant discussed the offer with Fred, Julia and Adam Badeau. He then wrote to a friend, George Childs, asking him to come to New York and assess the competing book offers. Childs soon decided that Twain had extended the better deal.
“His condition now stable,” Perry explains, Grant was again able to write. He was at this point, in early Dec. 1884, about to finish drafting the first part of his memoirs.
Finally, after Twain offered a 20 percent royalty on book sales (well above Century’s ten percent offer), Grant declared, “Give the book to Twain.” Clemens enthusiastically predicted that the general’s royalties could eventually amount to $420,000. To give Grant and his family some money in the meantime, Twain set aside $10,000 as an advance—“a highly unusual practice at the time,” Perry notes.
The Century Company’s leaders accepted Grant’s decision without rancor, understanding that in the publishing business, as in every business, it was all about the money.
Throughout late 1884, Grant tried to keep the actual state of his health from the press, even from his friends. When Cump Sherman paid a call to Grant’s home just before Christmas, he was more dismayed by signs of Grant’s financial distress than by evidence of his illness. In January ’85, Grant’s health showed slight improvement. “He now rose early each morning,” according to Perry, “wrapped himself in his shawl, and focused on writing his memoirs.” Dr. Douglas came to conclude that the general had resolved to tough it out—determined to finish writing his book before he died.
Still, by the end of February 1885, the general had not signed a contract with the Webster Company. On Feb. 26, as he relates in Mark Twain’s Notebook, Twain visited the Grant home; “I was astonished to see how thin and weak he was.” In Mark Perry’s words, “Twain was disturbed by Grant’s wan appearance. The general looked exhausted and spoke with difficulty and barely above a whisper.” At the end of his visit, Twain was taken aside by Fred, the general’s son, who said that doctors believed that Grant had only a few weeks to live; “Twain was shocked.” Yet Fred assured him that his father was working hard daily. By this time, the first planned volume of the memoirs was complete (taking Grant’s story from childhood through the Mexican War to Vicksburg), and the second was underway.
Twain, writes Perry, was such a “Grant-intoxicated man” that he had no doubt of his friend’s ability to finish the project. “Over the next months, as Grant faded, recovered, nearly slipped away, and then finally rallied, Twain never lost faith that his friend would win his last battle.” Grant’s determination stemmed in good measure from the awareness that he was writing a book whose sales would provide financially
for Julia and his family. In the process he felt strengthened, even envisioning the final appearance of the published memoirs: two volumes, each of about 450 printed pages. (In the set that I own, published in 1885 and 1886, Volume One has 584 pages; Two, with an index, is 647 pages long.)
Clemens aided Grant’s work in several ways. He instructed the Webster Company to finalize its contract and have it delivered to the Grant residence on 66th Street, where Grant finally signed it on February 27. Twain also supported the general’s decision to hire a stenographer, Noble Dawson, to take down Grant’s dictation and read it back to him. At the same time, Twain was planning the marketing campaign for the memoirs. He was short of cash, so he took out a loan of $200,000 to cover the printing of Grant’s book. He also increased his subscription canvassers’ commissions to incentivize their activity. Eventually these sales agents, traveling door to door selling the book, would include a large number of Union veterans, who saw the work as one of homage to a great Northern war leader.
“Twain was everywhere at once,” as Perry puts it, “insisting that he oversee every part of the operation, from reading the galleys to ordering the paper to ensuring that the book was properly printed, marketed, advertised, and sold.”
But there was a very big issue
that Sam Clemens could not manage: his friend’s health. In early January 1885, New York papers began reporting that Grant was ill, though they did not know the specifics. So many people in the city were now aware of the general’s malady that the Times came out with an electrifying headline on its front page on March 1: “GRANT IS DYING.” Within a day, reporters bunched outside the Grant home, craning to peer into windows. Some irreverently termed their vigil a “death watch.” Reporters from across the country soon arrived. Then there were the casual onlookers and curiosity seekers. Soon the N.Y.P.D. had to post constables outside the house to contain the crowd.
Actually, however, Grant’s doctors believed that the general’s writing not only diverted his attention from pain but was, as Dr. Douglas told Julia, possibly enabling him to live longer. Julia disagreed, arguing that the work was weakening her husband and should be suspended. Grant settled the issue by telling everyone that he wanted to continue working.
Former comrades made appointments to come by and pay respects; Grant entertained them as his health and work schedule allowed. Even the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston visited. Grant proved genuinely happy when he received a visit from John Logan, a Union division commander at Vicksburg;
I Held Lincoln: A Union Sailor’s Journey Home. By Richard E. Quest. Illustrations, maps, 224 pp., 2018. Potomac Books of the University of Nebraska Press, www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. $24.95 hardbound. Reviewed by Frank J. Williams
With over 2,200 books about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln among 16,000 books and pamphlets published about the sixteenth president, one wonders if there is anything left to say about him. The answer is, of course, “yes.” The stories about participants of the Civil War continue to fascinate and interest us. This is the first time that a sailor’s visit to see Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre has been published.
Union Navy Lt. Benjamin W. Loring limped, from war wounds, to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, to see President Lincoln attend Our American Cousin. This evening would turn into an expected horror.
Looking to the presidential box, Loring saw the Lincolns and another couple enter the box after the play had started. At about 10:15 p.m., Loring heard a gunshot. He looked toward the presidential box and saw a man (later identified as John Wilkes Booth) jumping from the balcony to the stage. He exited out by the rear of the theatre.
Climbing into the box, Loring helped Lt. William Flood move
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the President to the floor. Loring cut Lincoln’s tie to help his breathing. Loring, with three others, carried Lincoln from the theater to the Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln was to die at 7:22 the next morning, April 15th.
Having enlisted in the United States Navy in 1862, Loring commanded a gun division aboard the USS Galena during the battle of Drewry’s Bluff. In 1863 he participated in the naval assault on Fort Sumter. He was promoted to lieutenant and was given command of the USS Wave.
On May 6, 1864, Loring and his crew were attacked by Confederates when the Wave was powerless due to lack of coal. After fending them off, Loring was forced to surrender his vessel. He and his crew were sent to Camp Groce, a prisoner of war camp in Texas. Loring and his men faced abuse and starvation.
On his second attempt, using false passes, Loring escaped. After a grueling 25-day journey across Texas, wearing a stolen Confederate uniform and surviving on dry corn, he finally made his way to a Union gunboat in Louisiana
Loring then learned after reporting to the Washington Navy Yard in Washington that his reputation had been destroyed because of his surrender of the Wave. He set about describing his ship’s dilemma and lack of coal to Admiral Farragut. He obviously convinced his commanding admiral; he received a new command as head of the “Naval Rendezvous” at the Washington Navy Yard.
The war appeared over when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. Loring learned that President Lincoln would be attending Ford’s Theatre and he purchased a ticket to attend. He was hoping to enjoy an evening’s entertainment—only to serve his country again by administering to its fallen chief magistrate.
The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860–1865. Edited by Janet Elizabeth Croon. Illustrations, maps, footnotes, source notes, index, 480 pp., 2018. Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com. $34.95 hardback.
Publishing the Civil War-era diary of a soldier, politician, or civilian who witnessed “the late unpleasantness” is a tradition that dates back over a century or more. Some have become classics, such as the daily journal of Union soldier Elijah Hunt Rhodes. Renowned civilian diaries include those penned by New York attorney George Templeton Strong and Confederate socialite Mary Chesnut.
Many, if not most, however, offer the reader little in the way of thoughtful insight, with the diarist’s entries generally nothing more than mundane comments on the weather or the food at hand.
That is hardly the case with the diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham— an educated and highly observant twelve-year-old Georgia lad when his diary begins in June 1860. That this diary remained unpublished for so long is a story unto itself and is explained in the publisher’s preface. It represents the first-ever published diary of a male teenage civilian—North or South—who experienced the entire Civil War. For the most part, Leroy’s thoughts and observations were either from within his bedroom or outside in his small, custom-made wagon in which a family slave pulled him around.
LeRoy Gresham was the son of a wealthy slaveholding family in Macon, Georgia. Per the 1860 census, his father owned ninety-three slaves and two plantations totaling over 1,700 acres. As a consequence of that affluence, young Gresham had access to the best of everything Southern culture could offer. This reality is apparent in everything he sees and records.
Yet the one thing LeRoy could never obtain was good health. He was practically an invalid, his leg having been crushed in 1856 when a collapsing chimney fell upon him. Worse, it was an injury that never properly healed. Only a few years later he contracted the illness that would eventually prove fatal, which we now know was a form of tuberculosis (also popularly known at the time as “consumption”). As his seven-volume diary opens, his father had made plans to take young Gresham to Philadelphia to seek the best possible medical treatment. It was a trip that would prove fruitless.
Macon was an important Confederate depot, allowing LeRoy to witness and record all of the various troops that came and went. Yet until the time of General William Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in late 1864, LeRoy’s Civil War was somewhat distant, something to be read about in the papers, and young Gresham was indeed a voracious reader of anything he could acquire. As he read of the distant battles and politics, his remarks display confidence—and perhaps a youthful naiveté—in the Confederate cause, yet also a mature skepticism about newspaper accuracy. Nevertheless, it is his astute observations on his family’s travails and his slow physical decline that are engaging.
As for the contentious slavery issue, LeRoy wrote matter-of-factly. Unfortunately for the modern reader, he offers no eloquent rumination either defending or disparaging the South’s chattel slavery system. Though he routinely mentions his family’s slaves by their first names, it is apparent that he viewed the institution simply as a given, a mere fact of Southern life that was all he knew. LeRoy’s last entry was on June 9, 1865, just weeks after the final Confederate surrender and only nine days before his death on June 18 at the age of seventeen.
Editor Janice Croon—a professional genealogist and former educator—does an excellent job of annotating and editing the diary. For example, the author’s thrice-daily temperature records have been judiciously edited while Croon’s footnotes (far superior to endnotes for reading ease) are plentiful and place Gresham’s remarks in full context. As a result, a reader somewhat unfamiliar with the Civil War could easily understand and enjoy this book.
The extras provided in this book are first-rate. In addition to Gresham’s diary, a “dramatis personae” section identifies all close and distant relatives, friends, family slaves, politicians and soldiers mentioned in the text. Dennis A. Rasbach, MD, has provided a superb medical foreword and afterword, in which Gresham’s tuberculosis is placed in full historical perspective and how modern science diagnosed young Gresham’s disease.
Hundreds of Civil War books are published each year. While many may be well-researched and written, only a small number are truly important in that they significantly advance our understanding of the rebellion or offer the reader something unique or previously unknown. This work is one of those relative few. It has set a new bar for publishers and editors with regard to publishing any Civil War diary that may come to light in the future. Gresham’s diary is an amazing primary source document that, unbeknownst to its author at the time, slowly chronicles his own demise while concurrently documenting the Confederacy’s collapse. As such, I highly recommend this book.
Paul Taylor is an award-winning author of seven books pertaining to the Civil War era. His newest book is titled “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War, published by Kent State University Press.
