1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History The Best American History Essays on Lincoln.
1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History by Charles Bracelen Flood. 521 pp., 2009, Simon & Schuster, www.simonandschuster.com, $17, softcover. Perhaps too much of a good thing is not a good thing, as the old saying goes. The year 2009, the bicentennial of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth, saw hundreds of books flood the market about all aspects of the life of our 16th President. Some were very good, others not so great. The vast majority were simply a regurgitation of many facts surrounding Lincoln’s life. This is the case with these two books; they were simply part of the massive flood of 2009. The book of essays is a reprint of essays on President Lincoln from a variety of authors including James Oliver Horton, James McPherson and Mark E. Neely. They deal with such diverse topics as Lincoln and the Constitution, his marriage to Mary Todd and his conduct of the Civil War. These essays are the best in their field, reflecting deep attention to scholarship by their writers. The intention stated in the introduction was to place the very best in one source for easy reader access. The unfortunate part of doing so was that, in the end, some of these essays are a bit dated and do not present any new or very important material that has surfaced in recent years. The book is a good source of material about specific aspects of Lincoln’s life. 1864 Lincoln at the Gates is one of those books that need not have been written. It simply tells the facts of the last full year of Lincoln’s life, beginning with the spring offensives in Virginia and Georgia, continuing through the Overland Campaign, Early’s Raid, the fall campaigns in the Valley, and the eventual triumph of the Republican Party in the 1864 elections. This book is a mere summary of this most volatile of years in the Civil War. In recent years many inroads have been made in a great variety of manuscript, newspaper and other primary sources that relate directly to the impact of that year. These sources are not used here. Unfortunately, the author follows the tried and traditional view of mostly using printed primary and other secondary sources to compose his narrative. The result is a book that is an overview of the year 1864, not a definitive study. In conclusion, these two books suffer from the fact that they were written for a mass market and for the Lincoln Bicentennial in 2009. If a reader has never read anything on the subject before, both books will provide the basic facts but will leave him or her wanting more. Reviewer: Robert Grandchamp
Robert Grandchamp of Rhode Island earned his M.A. in history from Rhode Island College. He has authored numerous works on American military history from the Revolution to the War on Terror. He resides in Rhode Island.
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The Best American History Essays on Lincoln. Edited by Sean Wilentz. 252 pp., 2009, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgrave.com, $16.95, softcover.