100 books like Mourning Lincoln

James McPherson, the dean of Civil War scholars, is known to most readers as the author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, far and away the best single-volume history of the conflict. But this volume, which came out roughly a decade later in 1997, was one of the first military histories to move beyond generals and commanders and examine why common soldiers enlisted and remained loyal to their fellows even as the bloody conflict dragged on.

After reading tens of thousands of letters and diaries of more than one thousand U.S. and C.S.A. soldiers, McPherson opens previously shuttered windows into their hearts and minds. Their letters home reveal both the tedium and terror of numerous campaigns, and most of all, show how common soldiers were forced to wrestle with the issue of slavery, with northern soldiers, rather like their commander-in-chief, increasingly committed to ending the South’s… show more.

I read a lot, and this book always shows up in my top five all-time favorites.

Lovingly written, Blight draws a compelling picture of a complex, endlessly fascinating human being. I love the power of Douglass’s words and voice. In my opinion, this is a great book about the man who arguably may be the greatest African American our country has produced. He was a voice for social justice in a time and place where speaking up brought real physical risk. 

This book recovers—through diligent archival spadework and keen historical empathy—the human realities of emancipation for freedom-seeking enslaved persons. Emancipation, Taylor demonstrates, was a humanitarian refugee crisis acted out amidst the uncertainties of civil warfare. Embattled Freedom supplies a sweeping survey of a complex historical process, but it does so on a human scale—tracking a small group of protagonists as they wind their way to the uncertain asylum of slave refugee (“contraband”) camps. The author’s close attention to the material realities of “contraband” camps—hunger, shelter, and clothing—builds a sense of intimacy and emotional connection. Scholars have established that emancipation was a process, and that the enslaved played a vital role in their own liberation; here is the best account of how that struggle was lived.   

Death is everywhere in war: on the battlefield, in a disease-ridden hospital, or in childbirth on the home front. Drew Gilpin Faust’s non-fiction book, This Republic of Suffering, brings eye-popping numeric data to the prevalence of death in war. But she never stops at the surface level of how many deaths, or how many unidentified soldiers or improper burials occur during the Civil War. I was caught up entirely as Faust’s words, riveting and respectful of all the pain and loss, showed how death became an ennobling transformation for many people, either in the cause of racial standing or of Union/secessionist preservation.

If you can read only one book on Lincoln, this is the one I would choose. In my opinion—as well as that of many professional historians—it is the best book ever written to examine why Lincoln waited two years after becoming president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In this brilliant and elegantly written book, a Pulitzer Prize historian argues, entirely convincingly, that the need to keep together his pro-union coalition required Lincon to proceed very cautiously.

To be sure, Foner writes that while Lincoln’s long-held anti-slavery convictions were not in doubt, he also initially shared the racist attitudes that black people were not ready for full freedom. However, Foner emphasizes that as Lincoln grew in office, his beliefs increasingly moved towards those of Frederick Douglass—whom Lincoln came to greatly admire—and other full-fledged abolitionists.

This book opened my eyes to the effectiveness and consistency of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1860 in advancing their antislavery agenda, for example, by immediately abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and requiring any new states to prohibit slavery in their Constitutions.

This book describes the earnestness with which these members of the Senate and House pursued their antislavery agenda over the vehement objections of the Democrats from states that had remained in the Union. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the defects in the original Constitution that had permitted slavery within any of the original 13 states that had retained it. So, they amended the Constitution not once but three times to put an end to slavery and establish political equality in the United States. 

Thavolia Glymph analyzes the many ways that women—white and Black, enslaved and free, North and South—sought to promote or constrain the radical transformations promised by the Civil War. She interweaves well-known stories of white nurses and teachers and northern white feminists who labored to expand their claims on the nation with the lesser-known efforts of free, fugitive, and self-emancipated Black women and poor and working-class white women to ensure that the war led to greater liberty. Even some plantation mistresses became more politically active in efforts to impede Union military campaigns. This powerful book expands our concept of activism, forcing us to rethink its many meanings, sites, and goals in times of crisis. 

John Matteson is a deft prose stylist who once more delivers in this engrossing narrative of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of five key protagonists—including the poet Walt Whitman and a young Louisa May Alcott. The characters wind up on the murderous battlefields and teeming hospital wards of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The title is admittedly deceptive; readers expecting an operational or tactical history of Ambrose Burnside’s rout on the Rappahannock won’t find it here. On the other hand, those interested in a searing meditation on all that the war did to individual human bodies and minds—and the collective American soul—will savor this haunting, smart, and elegant book.  

As the title states, Elizabeth Varon’s book rests on the theme of deliverance, in this case the deliverance of the seceding states from slaveholder domination.

In an innovative, provocative, and utterly convincing fashion, Armies of Deliverance literally delivers on its promise to present a new history of the Civil War. With fresh material throughout, and careful attention to usually neglected moderate voices, Varon deftly weaves together military, political, and social history into a brilliantly conceived and highly original approach that will please a wide variety of readers.

Civil War statues have long been the gold standard for America’s monumental public landscape.

They are the public sculptures and architectural features we are now rediscovering, sometimes with horror, and arguing over, after years of mute service as park furniture and pigeon roosts. Brown’s book is a definitive history of these classic, heroic monuments.

Beautifully written, perceptive, and illuminating, it explains their history, offering readers an engaging and invaluable background and context for understanding how and why they were erected, and how they’ve not only reflected American culture but have propelled it, particularly (as the title suggests) towards militarization and the affirmation of racial and class hierarchies.

Reading Civil War Monuments focuses our view on monumental things all around us that we’ve never really seen.