Kenneth P. Williams: Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War (1949)•
Kenneth Powers Williams (1887-1958)Kenneth P. Williams: Lincoln Finds a General (1949-1957)
[Jax Beach Books, Jacksonville Beach, Florida - 26/1-9/2/2024]:
Kenneth P. Williams. Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War. 5 vols. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949-1957.
- Vol. 1 (1949)
- Vol. 2 (1949)
- Vol. 3: Grant's First Year in the West (1952)
- Vol. 4: Iuka to Vicksburg (1956)
- Vol. 5: Prelude to Chattanooga (1957)
They say that his only rivals are Napoleon and Jesus Christ - when it comes to the number of books that have been written about each of them, that is. Not that the book above is precisely about Abraham Lincoln (despite its title).
I spotted it in the Messines Bookshop in Featherston last time I was down rummaging through booktown. Unfortunately they only had four of the five volumes (including a duplicate of one of them). It seemed a bit quixotic to buy it under those circumstances, especially as I wasn't quite sure just how many volumes the complete work was supposed to include.
As it turns out, five is the correct number, despite the fact that Williams had only reached the end of 1863 by then. He died in 1958, with his purpose unachieved.
Multi-volume works about the American civil war do seem to be a bit of an addiction of mine, as I mentioned in this post.
There are Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote's respective trilogies on the subject; Allan Nevins' 8-volume Ordeal of the Union; Carl Sandburg's six-volume life of Lincoln; not to mention Douglas Southall Freeman's four-volume life of Robert E. Lee - along with his Lee's Lieutenants trilogy. You can find a list of these and other items of American Civil War literature at the link here.
Bruce Catton: The Centennial History of the Civil War (3 vols: 1961-1965)
Allan Nevins: Ordeal of the Union (8 vols: 1947-1971)
Carl Sandburg: Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years / The War Years (6 vols: 1926 & 1939)
Douglas Southall Freeman: R. E. Lee: A Biography / Lee's Lieutenants (7 vols: 1934-35 / 1942-44)I recall being told of one Civil War enthusiast who could be overheard making musket noises out of the side of his mouth as he perused yet another eyewitness account of some earth-shattering battle. I'm not like that. I'm afraid that I fall into that more sentimental school of readers who have to sniff back a tear or two when some more than usually sonorous utterance is quoted:
... on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."Then, thenceforward, and forever free" ... they don't come much better than that.
A good many of these inspiring quotes seem to come from that "myriad-minded man" (as Coleridge characterised Shakespeare), Abraham Lincoln. It's hard to avoid him when talking about that war. Grant and Lee were certainly, in their very different ways, great generals, but it's really Lincoln who continues to define it. In his way, he's a figure as influential as Julius Caesar or Napoleon, but without their tainted legacies of insurrection and political murder ...
Here are a few interesting books, some well-known, others more specialised, about various aspects of his life:
Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Doris Kearns Goodwin. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. 2005. Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Jim Bishop. The Day Lincoln Was Shot. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955.The last of these titles gives us the essential clue just why Lincoln has become such a Christ-like character in popular culture: his assassination just at the cusp of the Union triumph in the Civil War - and before the bitterness of Reconstruction had begun.
This particular drama has everything: prophetic dreams, a charismatic killer, and ... more resonant words: "Now he belongs to the ages," spoken by Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War, an old enemy turned fervent supporter.
For a more subtle, albeit fictional, recreation of his character, you could do worse than Gore Vidal's historical novel Lincoln, part of his seven-volume "Chronicles of Empire" series.
I'm afraid that I can't similarly recommend Honoré Morrow's rather outdated Great Captain, though it does give a certain insight into the strange world of Lincoln-worship as it existed in the century or so after his death.
It also offers an insight into the nature of Lincoln iconography in Hollywood cinema, from the sublime to the ridiculous: beginning with John Ford's brilliant Young Mr. Lincoln in 1939, and concluding with Steve Spielberg's almost equally impressive Lincoln some 70-odd years later - with amusing side-excursions such as Timur Bekmambetov's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, based on Seth Grahame-Smith's novel of the same name.
Perhaps the best approach to the whole subject, though, remains the most traditional: reading the man's own words, commodiously collected and packaged by the Library of America for the Lincoln Bicentennial:
Lincoln, Abraham. Speeches and Writings 1832-1858: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings / The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. 1989. The Library of America, 45. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.However, if you can't quite face a commitment on that scale, there's always the book below, The Living Lincoln. It offers a good overview of his life, extracted from his speeches and other, more intimate, writings:
Lincoln, Abraham. Speeches and Writings 1859-1865: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings / Presidential Messages and Proclamations. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. 1989. The Library of America, 46. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.
Holzer, Harold, ed. The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now. The Library of America, 192s. The Bicentennial Edition. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.
The Living Lincoln: The Man, His Mind, His Times, and the War He Fought, Reconstructed From His Own Writings. Ed. Paul M. Angle & Earl Schenk Miers. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
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