The best books about Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln famously had little formal education but was capable of sophisticated logical thinking in his arguments. He credits his ability to form his arguments to his encounter with Euclid’s writings about geometry. He felt in awe by the notion of “demonstration” and went on to apply that notion to his compelling arguments about the injustice and hypocrisy of slavery. 

Levinson’s book does not focus on traditional battle sites. Rather, it thoughtfully introduces readers to battles that take place over clashing expressions of public memory, particularly memorial controversies, including clashes over name changes and monument removal. I think readers will appreciate his thoughtful treatment of the vexing issues that have swirled around the appropriate location of Confederate memorials. Well before the recent push to remove such memorials from public space, Levinson offered readers various options for dealing with such volatile issues. His book is an insightful and timely guide into the battlefields of public memory.

Deaf people served as soldiers, nurses, cooks, even spies during the American Civil War. This book celebrates their bravery and how they applied their skills to fight for what they believed in.

If Marszalek’s book is thin on any aspect of Sherman it is on his writing — the eloquent, powerful weapon he brandished during the war and the efficient, versatile tool with which he constructed his legacy in his Memoirs.

As a young man, the letters he wrote to his foster sister and future wife Ellen contained carefully constructed sentences with descriptive flourishes; as an adult, he borrowed liberally from his love of Shakespeare and the theater to craft his persona in his Memoirs.

Cushman, an award-winning poet and historian, places Sherman’s writing in the context of four other Northern writers (Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Chamberlain) who were inspired by the “belligerent muse” — war. You will treasure this book, which is unlike any other book about history or literature you’ve ever read.

If Abraham Lincoln had survived the war, the country might have followed an entirely different track. Rather than send carpetbaggers to rule the southern states, Lincoln planned on working with the existing rebel governments to transition them back into the Union. However, his policy toward the newly freed blacks was uncertain. Lincoln’s hope was that blacks and whites would learn to live together given time. He just hadn’t figured out how to make that happen.

What’s certain is that Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy to power derailed many of Lincoln’s plans and reversed many of the gains African-Americans had won. Johnson favored quick restoration of the southern states. At the same time, he refused to educate the freedmen and work them into society. His hope was that things would go back to the way they were before the war. Blacks would no longer be slaves but still be dependent on their former… show more.

This book has several of my all-time favorite story elements.

First, it’s historical fiction based on an impressive but long-overlooked female pioneer: Kate Warne, the first woman Pinkerton detective.

Second, it has both a high-stakes political story as the characters try to protect the president of the United States from assassination and a high-stakes personal story, as Nell Warne (Kate’s fictional niece) tries to uncover the secret of her father’s death. Did he really kill his own brother? Nell refuses to believe it.

Third, Nell is a funny, spit-fire narrator. And finally, there are secret codes for the reader to solve!

Folklore and nature conservation is a subjects close to my heart. When I met my husband, an ecologist, many of our first conversations were on the importance of narrative to get people interested in conservation efforts. Folklore is the perfect tool.

This book does that job beautifully. As a piece of narrative nonfiction, it collects fairy tales, personal memoirs, and natural history in a lyrical journey through the forests of England. Maitland centers each chapter on an English woodland and the stories associated with it, be they fairy tales or history. More importantly, she discusses not only how myth shapes culture, but how landscape shapes myth. I reference it time and again not only as an academic, but as an author who creates worlds rich in landscape and folklore.

When newspapers were the only medium before radio and TV and the internet, they were omnipresent in their own way, and highly partisan. They played dirty, and Lincoln did too. He knew that his careful words would have no impact unless he could get them printed in at least some of the papers he favored, bribed with access and rewards, or helped outflank their (and his) rivals.

David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976; winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for History) remains, after nearly half-a-century, the best narrative on the coming of the Civil War. It brims with perceptive analysis and very usefully instructs readers about history’s vexing complications. Completed after Potter’s death by his colleague at Stanford Don E. Fehrenbacher, the engaging text forcefully reminds readers to keep in mind the contingent nature of politics and to avoid assuming events had to play out as they did. Part of the period’s complexity lay in the fact that although the crisis of 1860-1861 had everything to do with slavery’s powerful influence over American political affairs, the increasingly heated rhetoric of the secession winter did not focus on whether the nation would keep or jettison the institution. Four years of war answered that fundamental question.

I consider this the best, most comprehensive biography of Dr. King, and essential reading for all who want to understand him, the Civil Rights movement, his struggles, and his methodology of nonviolence. There are other good books, but this tells the whole story in clear prose and leaves the reader overwhelmed by his staggering, faithful, visionary life, and challenged to do something for justice, disarmament, and nonviolence. Still one of my all-time favorite books! I read it every year, and find myself re-energized all over again to carry on Dr. King’s work for social, economic, and racial justice as well as disarmament and nonviolence.

I am a total sucker for crime books that include blueprints of the house where a murder took place… and specifically for books about Lizzie Borden and what she did (or did not do) on August 4, 1892. I really can’t explain my preoccupation. A Private Disgrace delivers on the blueprints and much more. I have read it many times over. The author was born twelve years after the murders in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lincoln heard from her parents how Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for butchering her father and stepmother with an axe. The author knows the town intimately and uses her insider knowledge to formulate plausible answers as to who committed the murders and why. And Lincoln thrusts us directly into the murder house with her vivid depictions. The stifling heat of the August day, the family’s three consecutive meals of left-over mutton, the stink of the… show more.

America Aflame demonstrates how people’s religious views impacted the extended length and divisiveness of the American Civil War. Both sides in the conflict thought God was on their side; they had to keep on fighting. And yet, some Northern Christians condemned slavery for its inhumanity, while some Southerners extolled slavery for its social benefits. In my historical fiction trilogy, I also show the tensions between war’s destructive methods and the religious beliefs of common citizens who refuse to fight. David Goldfield’s storytelling style of non-fiction writing captured my attention, whether describing the tone of this bold new country, or parsing the dueling natures of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.

A giant of the nineteenth century and the leader of the struggle to end slavery needs a giant book and Blight’s is the most penetrating and comprehensive biography we have of the person many consider the voice and soul of the abolitionist movement and the struggle to win the right guaranteed in the Constitution.

This is one book where, by the end, I was absolutely convinced that Abraham Lincoln actually hunted and killed vampires, on the side. It’s cleverly written, and the photographs (actual photos) were photo-shopped, to give the story an authentic feel to it. Gifted with his legendary height, and axe (of course!) Abraham sets out, hell-bent on revenge, after discovering that his beloved mother had actually been killed by a vampire when he was a boy. The book is full of facts, giving us a history lesson on Abe Lincoln’s life, from when he was a boy until his assassination, in 1865. It also tells us of his campaign to stamp out slavery and his rise to become the sixteenth—and one of the most influential—president of the United States of America. Thoroughly enjoyable, and believable! 

Flashman does a thing I love, which is to tell the story of another book's least notable character.

Harry Flashman comes from Thomas Hughes's 1850 novel Tom Brown's School Days (the entire basis for the Harry Potter novels), where he's a sub-Draco Malfo figure, a useless bully.

Flashman tells the story of his later years as the Victorian Empire's most cowardly soldier, rattling around British colonies, stumbling through their various atrocities and debacles. I wish the book were even harsher on the Brits, but it's a deeply fun counter-text and a lovely bit of escapism nonetheless.

Published in 1898 and now largely forgotten, this book is the only oral history we have of Grant. Garland, a substantial nineteenth-century literary figure, spent two years locating and interviewing people who knew Grant—generals and privates, family and neighbors in St. Louis and Galena, Illinois. Grant was a self-enclosed man, but he opened up to those he knew and trusted. It would be impossible to write a reliable life study of him without consulting Garland’s superb biography, or reading the transcripts of his interviews, which can be found in his papers at the University of Southern California’s Doheny Memorial Library.

Lincoln’s religious faith, a puzzle to many, has been a central interest of mine. As a young man Lincoln was accused of infidelity; in maturity he made no religious profession. Yet he read and reread the Bible, attended church in Washington, reflected on God’s purposes, and shared ideas with ministers. White has written several studies of Lincoln, including a fine biography, but none surpasses this bright gem of a book. He explains why Lincoln considered his second inaugural address, delivered as the war ended, to be his greatest speech—a sermon rooted in faith. Believing the war to be God’s judgment on the whole nation for its complicity in the sin of slavery, he urged postwar charity to all. Fittingly, its text is paired with the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Memorial.  

This is a delightful, novelistic read on the U.S.-Mexico War.

When the United States invaded Mexico on thin pretenses in 1846, it resulted in a massive annexation of territory while, at the same, sparking a genuine anti-war protest movement. Amy Greenberg puts Henry Clay, James K. Polk, and Abraham Lincoln at the center of the story. Her book sheds new light on the origins of the Civil War and the evolution of American empire.

People known for witty sayings or informative stories – think Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker, or Yogi Berra and Samuel Goldwyn – tend to have any such items foisted on them. Lincoln, who was a genuine purveyor of funny and biting remarks is a victim of this form of theft in reverse. Any pointed or funny words get more dignity or heft if attributed to him. It is amazing how many such pseudo quotes are collected and sifted by the Fehrenbachers. There is a whole false American history that could be woven together from these fakes.

William Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner and knew and worked with him from the early 1840s until 1861 when Lincoln left for Washington. After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Herndon tirelessly interviewed many of Lincoln’s family and neighbors from his childhood and youth. As I noted many years ago, Herndon’s project was the first oral history in American literature. His vast collection was long disdained by scholars. I used the records extensively myself and in the 1980s and 1990s those in the Lincoln field realized the letters and interviews were a priceless source. Doug Wilson and his colleagues did an excellent job in editing the Herndon material that is both invaluable for understanding Lincoln and providing a social history of the frontier in the early part of the 19th century.