1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [273]
Joshua Wolf Shenk’s thoughtful and empathetic Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) opens a new window into the soul of the sixteenth president, shedding light on almost every aspect of Lincoln’s life and decision making. William Lee Miller’s President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) traces its subject’s moral and political evolution.
In reconstructing the difficult chronology and interlocking events of the secession crisis, I was aided greatly by Russell McClintock’s recent Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession, cited above.
Chapter Five: The Volunteer
The only relatively modern biography of Elmer Ellsworth is Ruth Painter Randall’s lively Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and First Hero of the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), which is carefully researched and well written but unfortunately not footnoted. Charles Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth and the Zouaves of ’61 (University of Chicago Press, 1925) and Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” in Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, both contain useful information and lengthy passages from period sources.
On the cultural history of youth in nineteenth-century America, see Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton University Press, 1999); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 2006).
Marcus Cunliffe’s Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) is a subtle, learned, and colorful exploration of Americans’ ambivalent attitudes toward war and the military. See also James B. Whisker, The Rise and Decline of the American Militia System (Susquehanna University Press, 1999).
Michael Burlingame, in Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), collects a number of articles that provide glimpses of Washington during the first weeks of the war, from someone close to both Lincoln and Ellsworth. Burlingame also edited At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and, with John R. Turner Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999)—both offer further accounts by Lincoln’s voluble private secretary—as well as With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Chapter Six: Gateways to the West
For the building of the transcontinental telegraph, see James Gamble, “Wiring a Continent,” The Californian, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1881); also Carlyle N. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” (master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1937); the growth of Western Union is covered in Robert Luther Thompson’s Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1947). The most reliable account of the Pony Express is Christopher Corbett’s myth-busting Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). See also John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (University of Illinois Press, 1979).
Pamela Herr provides the best account of Jessie Frémont’s life in Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987). Herr