T Michael Parrish – författare

By the time of the Civil War, the railroads had advanced to allow the movement of large numbers of troops even though railways had not yet matured into a truly integrated transportation system. Gaps between lines, incompatible track gauges, and other vexing impediments remained in both the North and South. As John E. Clark explains in this compelling study, the skill with which Union and Confederate war leaders met those problems and utilized the rail system to its fullest potential was an essential ingredient for ultimate victory.

Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli's Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters' backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers' imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln's life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln's legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president. Wetta and Novelli's work is the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln's life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film.

Alabamians in Blue offers an in-depth scholarly examination of Alabama's black and white Union soldiers and their contributions to the eventual success of the Union army in the western theater. Christopher M. Rein contends that the state's anti-Confederate residents tendered an important service to the North, primarily by collecting intelligence and protecting logistical infrastructure. He highlights an underappreciated period of biracial cooperation, underwritten by massive support from the federal government. Providing a broad synthesis, Rein's study demonstrates that southern dissenters were not passive victims but rather active participants in their own liberation. Ecological factors, including agricultural collapse under levies from both armies, may have provided the initial impetus for Union enlistment. Federal pillaging inflicted further heavy destruction on plantation agriculture. The breakdown in basic subsistence that ensued pushed Alabama's freedmen and Unionists into federal camps in garrison cities in search of relief and the opportunity for revenge. Once in uniform, Alabama's Union soldiers served alongside northern regiments and frustrated Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's attempts to interrupt the Union supply efforts in the 1864 Atlanta campaign, which led to the collapse of Confederate arms in the western theater and the eventual Union victory. Rein describes a ""hybrid warfare"" of simultaneous conventional and guerilla battles, where each significantly influenced the other. He concludes that the conventional conflict both prompted and eventually ended the internecine warfare that largely marked the state's experience of the war. A comprehensive analysis of military, social, and environmental history, Alabamians in Blue uncovers a past of biracial cooperation in the American South, and in Alabama in particular, that postwar adherents to the ""Myth of the Lost Cause"" have successfully suppressed until now.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, federal officials captured, imprisoned, and indicted Jefferson Davis for treason. If found guilty, the former Confederate president faced execution for his role in levying war against the United States. Although the federal government pursued the charges for over four years, the case never went to trial. In this comprehensive analysis of the saga, Treason on Trial, Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez suggests that while national politics played a role in the trial's direction, the actions of lesser-known individuals ultimately resulted in the failure to convict Davis. Early on, two primary factions argued against trying the case. Influential northerners dreaded the prospect of a public trial, fearing it would reopen the wounds of the war and make a martyr of Davis. Conversely, white southerners pointed to the treatment and prosecution of Davis as vindictive on the part of the federal government. Moreover, they maintained, the right to secede from the Union remained within the bounds of the law, effectively linking the treason charge against Davis with the constitutionality of secession. While Icenhauer-Ramirez agrees that politics played a role in the case, he suggests that focusing exclusively on that aspect obscures the importance of the participants. In the United States of America v. Jefferson Davis, preeminent lawyers represented both parties. According to Icenhauer-Ramirez, Lucius H. Chandler, the local prosecuting attorney, lacked the skill and temperament necessary to put the case on a footing that would lead to trial. In addition, Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase had little desire to preside over the divisive case and intentionally stymied the prosecution's efforts. The deft analysis in Treason on Trial illustrates how complications caused by Chandler and Chase led to a three-year delay and, eventually, to the dismissal of the case in 1868, when President Andrew Johnson granted blanket amnesty to those who participated in the armed rebellion.

Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers' food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government's efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment and open supply lines enjoyed by Union soldiers enabled them to cope successfully with the South's extreme conditions and, ultimately, secure victory in 1865.Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noerethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war. Unlike past studies that fault inflation, taxation, and logistical problems for the Confederate defeat, his work considers how soldiers and civilians dealt with floods and droughts that beset areas of the South in 1862, 1863, and 1864. In doing so, he addresses the foundational causes that forced Richmond to make difficult and sometimes disastrous decisions when prioritizing the feeding of the home front or the front lines. The Howling Storm stands as the first comprehensive examination of weather and climate during the Civil War. Its approach, coverage, and conclusions are certain to reshape the field of Civil War studies.

The fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is well known, so much so that many scholars rarely question the standard narrative casting the two as foils, with the Great Emancipator inevitably coming out on top over his supposedly feckless commander. In Conflict of Command, acclaimed Civil War historian George C. Rable rethinks that stance, providing a new understanding of the interaction between the president and his leading wartime general by reinterpreting the political aspects of their partnership.Rable pays considerable attention to Lincoln's cabinet, Congress, and newspaper editorials, revealing the role each played in shaping the dealings between the two men. While he surveys McClellan's military campaigns as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Rable focuses on the political fallout of the fighting rather than the tactical details. This broadly conceived approach highlights the army officers and enlisted men who emerged as citizen-soldiers and political actors.Most accounts of the Lincoln-McClellan feud solely examine one of the two individuals, and the vast majority adopt a steadfast pro-Lincoln position. Taking a more neutral view, Rable deftly shows how the relationship between the two developed in a political context and ultimately failed spectacularly, profoundly altering the course of the Civil War itself.

Finalist for the Lincoln Prize!Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers' food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government's efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment and open supply lines enjoyed by Union soldiers enabled them to cope successfully with the South's extreme conditions and, ultimately, secure victory in 1865.Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noe rethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war. Unlike past studies that fault inflation, taxation, and logistical problems for the Confederate defeat, his work considers how soldiers and civilians dealt with floods and droughts that beset areas of the South in 1862, 1863, and 1864. In doing so, he addresses the foundational causes that forced Richmond to make difficult and sometimes disastrous decisions when prioritizing the feeding of the home front or the front lines. The Howling Storm stands as the first comprehensive examination of weather and climate during the Civil War. Its approach, coverage, and conclusions are certain to reshape the field of Civil War studies.

Military uniforms, badges, flags, and other material objects have been used to represent the identity of Americans throughout history. In The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox examines the material culture of America's bloodiest conflict, offering a deeper understanding of the war and its commemoration.Cox's analysis traces the influence of sewn materials throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction as markers of power and authority for both the Union and the Confederacy. These textiles became cherished objects by the turn of the century, a transition seen in veterans replacing wartime uniforms with new commemorative attire and repatriating Confederate battle flags. Looking specifically at the creation of material culture by various commemoration groups, including the Grand Army of the Republic, the Woman's Relief Corps, the United Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Cox reveals the ways that American society largely accepted their messages, furthering the mission of their memory work.Through the lens of material culture, Cox sheds new light on a variety of Civil War topics, including preparation for war, nuances in relationships between Native American and African American soldiers, the roles of women, and the rise of postwar memorial societies.

J. Matthew Ward's Garden of Ruins serves as an insightful social and military history of Civil War–era Louisiana. Partially occupied by Union forces starting in the spring of 1862, the Confederate state experienced the initial attempts of the U.S. Army to create a comprehensive occupation structure through military actions, social regulations, the destabilization of slavery, and the formation of a complex bureaucracy. Skirmishes between Union soldiers and white civilians supportive of the Confederate cause multiplied throughout this period, eventually turning occupation into a war on local households and culture. In unoccupied regions of the state, Confederate forces and their noncombatant allies likewise sought to patrol allegiance, leading to widespread conflict with those they deemed disloyal. Ward suggests that social stability during wartime, and ultimately victory itself, emerged from the capacity of military officials to secure their territory, governing powers, and nonmilitary populations. Garden of Ruins reveals the Civil War, state-building efforts, and democracy itself as contingent processes through which Louisianans shaped the world around them. It also illustrates how military forces and civilians discovered unique ways to wield and hold power during and immediately after the conflict.

Cecily N. Zander's The Army under Fire is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the Civil War era. It examines how prominent political figures interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation.

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict's similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was "one among many" such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War's place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s.Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time's developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations' insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners—Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation.The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

Charles Cowlam's career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam ""has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet."" He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to his elusive nature. His intrigues reveal how Americans built trust amid the transience and anonymity of the nineteenth century. The stories Cowlam told allowed him to blend in to new surroundings, where he quickly cultivated the connections needed to extract patronage from influential members of American society.Whereas historians of capitalism have uncovered the vulnerabilities of an economic system dependent upon trust and personal relationships, Cowlam's life exposes the liabilities of a political system constructed on the same foundations. Rather than perpetrating frauds against average citizens, Cowlam reserved his most fantastic schemes for officials in the highest levels of government. He is the only person to receive presidential pardons from both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. When the fighting ended, he conned his way into serving as a detective investigating Lincoln's assassination, later parlaying that experience into positions with the Internal Revenue Service and the British government.Reconstruction offered additional opportunities for Cowlam to repackage his identity. He convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal and persuaded Republicans in Florida to allow him to run for Congress. After losing the election, Cowlam moved to New York, where he became a serial bigamist and started a fake secret society inspired by the burgeoning Granger movement. When the newspapers exposed his lies, he disappeared and spent the next decade living under an assumed name. He resurfaced in Dayton, Ohio, claiming to be a Union colonel suffering from dementia in an effort to gain admittance into the National Soldiers' Home. In A Wonderful Career in Crime, Frank W. Garmon Jr. brings Cowlam's stunning machinations to light for the first time.

Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln's administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments indeed the entire war effort depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss's Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war's radical outcomes.

William Marvel's The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 examines a dozen understudied Confederate and Union military operations carried out during the spring of 1864 that, taken cumulatively, greatly revived white southerners' hopes for independence. Among the pivotal moments during this period were the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the CSS Hunley; Nathan Bedford Forrest's defeat of William Sooy Smith's cavalry raid; and the Confederate army's victory at Olustee, Florida. The repulse of Union advances on Dalton, Georgia; botched Union raids on Richmond; and the capture of the Union garrison in Plymouth, North Carolina, likewise suggested that the tide of fighting had turned toward the Confederate cause. These events boosted the morale of southern troops and citizens, and caused grave concerns about the war effort in the North and in the mind of Abraham Lincoln.In late 1863 and early 1864, dejection and despair prevailed in the South: Union soldiers had vanquished Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, the Confederate nation had been cut in two, Tennessee was lost, and Braxton Bragg's army had been utterly routed at Chattanooga. Defeatism loomed in the South during the first weeks of 1864, and the ease with which William T. Sherman rampaged across Mississippi illustrated the dominance of Union forces, while Confederates' ineffectual assault on New Bern accentuated their weakness. Yet between February 20 and April 30, southern troops enjoyed an unbroken string of successes that included turning back a concerted Union offensive during the Red River campaign as well as Forrest's triumphant incursions into Union City, Paducah, and Fort Pillow. Aided by flawed strategy implemented by Union army officers, the achievements of Confederate forces restored hope and confidence in camp and on the southern home front. The Confederacy's battlefield successes during the early months of 1864 remained almost unnoticed by Civil War scholars until recently and have never been investigated in detail until now. The victories invigorated southern combatants, demonstrating how abruptly the most dismal military prospects could be reversed. Without that experience, Marvel argues, the Confederates who faced Sherman and Grant in the spring of that year would certainly have displayed less ferocity and likely would have succumbed more quickly to the demoralization that ultimately led to the collapse of Confederate resistance.

David T. Ballantyne's Fractured Freedoms is a riveting history of central Louisiana from the 1860s to the 1890s, focusing on majority-Black Rapides Parish during Reconstruction. Using the region as a case study, Ballantyne reveals what is, in part, a rural Reconstruction success story, emphasizing the resilience of Black politics and the persistence of significant divisions among white residents that allowed the Republican Party to gain and maintain power there. It was only with the collapse of state-level Republican power in 1877 that Democratic forces in the parish were able to dismantle local Republican political control and gradually constrict Black freedoms.

The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship is a vast collection of Civil War correspondence from the affluent Pickens family of Greene County, Alabama. Unlike nearly all published letter collections from the era, the Pickens family correspondence includes letters written on the home front as well as those penned by family members serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. The correspondence provides rare insight into the mutual dependence of family on the home front and kin at war to sustain morale and foster the formation of Confederate national identity. Expertly edited, annotated, and contextualized by Henry McKiven Jr., the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee's army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary's letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle. As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish.

Damian Shiels's Green and Blue explores Irish American service in the United States military by analyzing the written correspondence of ordinary rank-and-file soldiers drawn from across the Union's armed forces. Using a vast and largely untapped collection of letters penned by Irish American combatants to their families during the war, Shiels explains how these enlisted men navigated their duties from multiple perspectives, including how they adapted to and experienced military life, how they engaged with their faith, and how they interacted with the home front. Green and Blue offers the most detailed and intimate picture yet of Irish Americans' service in the United States military during the Civil War.

In Late to the Fight, Alexandre F. Caillot explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly raised regiments that fought through the Civil War's final year. Historians have typically regarded these late enlistees as substandard to those who signed on at the war's start. Using the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire, Caillot shows that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy.

Carin Peller-Semmens's Unreconstructed grapples with the longstanding, systemic effects of white supremacist brutality in northwest Louisiana, highlighting the constancy of racial subjugation in one of the most violent areas of the South. Tracing the commitment of the region's white slaveholders to racial violence from antebellum enslavement through to Reconstruction, Peller-Semmens unearths the durable ideology of mastery in the Red River region. She demonstrates that white supremacy and vigilante violence were slaveholding recloaked, and became effective, calibrated tools of political, social, and economic control during Reconstruction. White supremacist violence—demonstrative, controlling, and visceral—attempted to redress mastery and subjugate and subdue newly emancipated Black individuals, imposing parameters on freedom. Unreconstructed shows that white violence and racial control were foundational elements of the regional ideology and identity that Reconstruction galvanized. This ideology of mastery transcended class, creating a shared ethos steeped in racist behavior that remained crucial to postwar conceptions of white selfhood. Barbarity, harnessed boldly and overtly, formed the apex of a diversified campaign of persistent violence that chipped away at freedpeople's experience of freedom and resulted in several seismic incidents of racial violence, including the massacres at Shady Grove, Colfax, and Coushatta. Peller-Semmens's arguments concerning racial power structures speak to race issues prevalent in America today, contributing significantly to a vibrant discourse on the inheritances of slavery and Reconstruction. Indeed, the implications of Reconstruction violence in this region still reverberate nationwide, making this corner of the South integral to the larger narrative of southern racism, white supremacy, and segregation.

The Devil's Own Purgatory is the first complete history of the Union navy's Mississippi Squadron, a fleet that prowled the Mississippi River and its tributaries during the American Civil War. The squadron battered Confederate forts, participated in combined operations with the army, obliterated the Confederate fleet, protected Union supply lines, fought a river-based counterinsurgency war, raided plantations, and facilitated the freedom of thousands of enslaved people.

Joshua R. Shiver's War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source base of more than 1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama, it builds upon traditional sociocultural and ideological arguments for why Confederate soldiers fought. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers' motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die.Shiver examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers' relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers' firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself. A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one's loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence. As a result, Confederate soldiers pragmatically embraced emotional and relational norms that were previously considered taboo.By placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries.

Timothy D. Grundmeier's Lutheranism and American Culture examines the transformation of the nation's third-largest Protestant denomination over the course of the nineteenth century. In the antebellum era, leading voices within the church believed that the best way to become American was by modifying certain historic doctrines deemed too Catholic and cooperating with Anglo-evangelicals in revivalism and social reform. However, by the mid-1870s, most Lutherans had rejected this view. Though they remained proudly American, most embraced a religious identity characterized by a commitment to their church's confessions, isolation from other Christians, and a conservative outlook on political and social issues. Grundmeier shows that this transformation did not happen in a vacuum. Throughout the Civil War and early years of Reconstruction, disputes over slavery and politics led to quarrels about theology and church affairs. During the war and immediately after, the Lutheran church in the United States experienced two major schisms, both driven by clashing views on the national conflict. In the postbellum years, Lutherans adopted increasingly conservative positions in theology and politics, mainly in reaction to the perceived "radicalism" of the era. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, Lutherans had established a rigorously conservative and definitively American form of the faith, distinct from their coreligionists in Europe and other Protestants in the United States. Although Grundmeier focuses on a single religious tradition, his study has implications for several areas of Civil War scholarship. First, it demonstrates how the Lutheran experience diverged from that of other Protestant groups, thereby expanding our understanding of how American Christians responded to the era's crises, including slavery, sectionalism, and national identity. In addition, his work reinforces and extends many of the findings in other historical fields: the political culture of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, the views of German and Scandinavian immigrants, and the various forms of conservatism among white northerners. Grundmeier's most significant contribution, however, is examining a previously unexplored subject. In the vast corpus of works on the Civil War era and American religious history, scholars have almost entirely overlooked the views and experiences of Lutherans. Lutheranism and American Culture seeks to remedy that neglect and serve as the starting point for understanding the formative decades of this distinctive faith.

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.

Henry Eustace McCulloch provides the first comprehensive account of a pivotal nineteenth-century military leader and politician from Texas. In his military career, Henry McCulloch served with his brother Ben in one of the first Texas Ranger companies after the Texas Revolution of 1836, defended settlers during the Great Comanche Raid of 1840, and helped to defeat Mexican forces that reoccupied San Antonio in 1842. He also served as a captain in the United States Army during the Mexican-American War. In the 1850s, voters in Texas elected McCulloch to the state legislature, where he advocated for creating additional Ranger units to defend settlers on the frontier. He was an enslaver who supported secession and commanded a regiment of Rangers that became the first unit sworn in by the Confederacy. McCullough later served as the temporary commander of the Department of Texas, directed regiments defending territory around San Antonio, briefly led the Texas Division, and participated in the attack at Milliken's Bend, Louisiana. After the Civil War, McCulloch remained active in politics, leading a group supporting Richard Coke during the Coke-Davis imbroglio in 1873 and running as the Populist Party's candidate for governor in 1892. David Paul Smith's biography reveals McCulloch's involvement in events that shaped nearly all of nineteenth-century Texas history, restoring his legacy as one of the state's most important military leaders and politicians.