1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [271]
A superb recent article by Jon Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign,” Journal of American History, vol. 96, no. 2 (September 2009) is, rather amazingly, the only in-depth treatment that the Wide Awakes have ever received.
Donald E. Reynolds’s Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) offers an important (though horrifying) account of racial violence in the Lone Star State and throughout the South in the summer and fall of 1860, a pivotal but hitherto almost ignored factor in fueling the secession crisis.
Chapter Two: The Old Gentlemen
Seven decades after its original publication, Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941) is still a paragon of historical writing, unsurpassed as an account of the nation’s capital just before and during the war. The London Times’s William Howard Russell arrived in Washington just before the attack on Sumter and recorded his impressions (both there and throughout the country) in My Diary North and South (Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1863), a delightfully wicked book. Mrs. Roger Pryor’s gossipy Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1908) vividly recalls antebellum Washington’s social and political circles from the viewpoint of a congressman’s wife. Constance McLaughlin Green’s several books on Washington are rich in detail, with The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 1967) ahead of its time in its portrayal of the local African-American community. Ernest B. Furgurson’s more recent Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) is another good account.
The only full-scale modern biography of John J. Crittenden is Albert D. Kirwan’s sympathetic John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (University Press of Kentucky, 1962). The senator’s papers in the Library of Congress are an invaluable resource.
Among the many fine books on the run-up to the war, two have particularly shaped my own account. The first of these is Kenneth Stampp’s And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Louisiana State University Press, 1950); the second is David M. Potter’s equally classic The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). For the Peace Conference, see Robert Gray Gunderson’s Old Gentlemen’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). Gabor S. Borritt, ed., Why the Civil War Came (Oxford University Press, 1996) offers a number of enlightening essays.
Three: Forces of Nature
For Abraham Lincoln’s journey to Washington and his activities and political strategy throughout the interim between his election and his inauguration, Harold Holzer’s Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008) is an authoritative, deeply researched source.
The standard biography of James Garfield is Allan Peskin’s Garfield: A Biography (Kent State University Press, 1978). Margaret Leech was working on a biography at the time of her death in 1974, focusing on the social and political world within which her subject lived; she had gotten as far as the Civil War. The book was finished posthumously by Harry J. Brown (unfortunately in a perfunctory fashion) and published as The Garfield Orbit (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). The best source on Garfield’s early political career is Robert I. Cottom’s “To Be Among the First: The Early Career of James A. Garfield, 1831–1868” (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1975). W. W. Wasson’s James A. Garfield: His Religion and Education. (Nashville: Tennessee Book Co., 1952) and Hendrik Booraem’s The Road to Respectability: