• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1805 0

James A. Garfield and His World, 1844–1852 (Bucknell University Press, 1988) are useful as well. The Diary of James A. Garfield (Michigan State University Press, 1967), edited by Harry J. Brown and Frederick D. Williams, is a window into Garfield’s intimate thoughts from his teenage years until the end of his life, although unfortunately he did not maintain the diary consistently during the late 1850s and early 1860s. The best published collection of his writings during that period is Mary L. Hinsdale, ed., Garfield-Hinsdale Letters: Correspondence Between James Abram Garfield and Burke Aaron Hinsdale (University of Michigan Press, 1949). The Library of Congress’s immense collection of Garfield’s papers, along with another significant deposit at the Western Reserve Historical Society, contain more information about the twentieth president than almost any historian has ever wanted to know.

The fascinating cultural history of nineteenth-century Ohio (I am aware that this phrase may strike some readers as an oxymoron) unfolds elegantly in a book by Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 2002). For the Civil War in Ohio, see David Van Tassel, “Beyond Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent State University Press, 2006); as well as Eric J. Cardinal, “The Ohio Democracy and the Crisis of Disunion, 1860–1861,” Ohio History, vol. 86, no. 1 (Winter 1977). The most thorough sources on the Disciples movement are Henry K. Shaw, Buckeye Disciples: A History of the Disciples of Christ in Ohio (St. Louis: Christian Board of Publication, 1952); and A. S. Hayden, Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (Cincinnati: Chase & Hall, 1875).

For the prewar Northern ideology of individualism, personal freedom, and egalitarianism, see Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (2nd ed., Fordham University Press, 1997). The classic treatment of the growth of free-soil republicanism and the birth of the Republican Party is Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1995). The cultural underpinnings of the Union cause are explored in James M. McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1997) and in Susan-Mary Grant’s North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (University Press of Kansas, 2000), which is especially incisive in its analysis of how Northerners contrasted their culture to that of the South. Also see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (University Press of Kansas, 2002).

The abolitionist movement in Ohio is chronicled in William Cheek and Annie Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (University of Illinois Press, 1989). Dorothy Sterling’s Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991) is the best biography of that fiery crusader.

Chapter Four: A Shot in the Dark

For sources on Fort Sumter, see under Prologue, above.

Thomas Bartel’s Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010) and JoAnn Smith Bartlett’s Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times: Looking Beyond the Myth (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris Corporation, 2009) are the only two biographies of baseball’s noninventor. Richard Wagner’s For Honor, Flag, and Family: Civil War Major General Samuel W. Crawford, 1827–1892 (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2005) treats Sumter’s surgeon. Edward M. Coffman’s The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (Oxford University Press, 1986) is a vivid and well-analyzed portrayal of that institution.

John G. Nicolay and John Hay’s multivolume Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Company, 1890) traces events leading up to and during the war from the perspective of the two men closest to the president throughout that period.