Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief - REVIEW

by Kenneth W. Noe

Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it.

George McClellan, Lincoln’s top general, emerged in Lincoln’s mind and the American psyche as his chief adversary, and to this day, the Lincoln-McClellan relationship remains central to the enduring legend. Lincoln came to view himself as a wiser warrior than McClellan, and as the war proceeded, a few members of Lincoln’s inner circle began to echo the president’s thoughts on his military prowess. Convinced of his own tactical brilliance, Lincoln demanded that Ulysses Grant, McClellan’s replacement, turn to the “hard, tough fighting” of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns, when Grant’s first instinct was to copy McClellan and swing into the Confederate rear.

Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s. Historians became torchbearers of the heroic legend and much else that we know about Lincoln, reorienting his biography forever. Based on lessons and language from the world wars, their arguments were so timely and powerful that they seized the field. Since then, biographers and historians have reevaluated many aspects of Lincoln’s life, but have rarely revisited his performance as commander in chief. Noe’s reappraisal is long overdue.

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

LSU Press
ISBN-13: 978-0807185216

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration - REVIEW

by Harold Holzer

In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.

Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.

Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.

Harold Holzer is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and the winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Educated at the City University of New York, he served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S. Abzug and Governor Mario Cuomo, and was a senior vice president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A prolific writer and lecturer, Holzer co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama. He now serves as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and is the author, co-author, or editor of more than fifty books.

Dutton
ISBN-13: 978-0451489012

The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States - REVIEW

by David J. Silverman

This year mark the 250th anniversary of American Independence, and it's imperative we consider the integral role Indigenous people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States is a sweeping chronicle examining how White identity, defined against Native Americans, became central to American nationhood, from Professor David J. Silverman, the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land.

A genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, shaping the social, political, and cultural arrangements that sustained America's racial divisions. Euro-Americans developed a sense of superiority, racial identity, and national mission of "being chosen." They claimed that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Indigenous people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission-of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny"; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race.

Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as Manifest Destiny; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, wen as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race. The Chosen and the Damned ultimately seeks to redress the absence of Indigenous people in histories of race in America.

David J. Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University. He is the author of the award-winning This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, as well as Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578386