Author: Steve Norder
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1611214580
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
A detailed history of one week during the Civil War in which the American president assumed control of the nation’s military. One rainy evening in May, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln boarded the revenue cutter Miami and sailed to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. There, for the first and only time in our country’s history, a sitting president assumed direct control of armed forces to launch a military campaign. In Lincoln Takes Command, author Steve Norderdetails this exciting, little-known week in Civil War history. Lincoln recognized the strategic possibilities offered by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s ongoing Peninsula Campaign and the importance of seizing Norfolk, Portsmouth, and the Gosport Navy Yard. For five days, the president spent time on sea and land, studied maps, spoke with military leaders, suggested actions, and issued direct orders to subordinate commanders. He helped set in motion many events, including the naval bombardment of a Confederate fort, the sailing of Union ships up the James River toward the enemy capital, an amphibious landing of Union soldiers followed by an overland march that expedited the capture of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and the navy yard, and the destruction of the Rebel ironclad CSS Virginia. The president returned to Washington in triumph, with some urging him to assume direct command of the nation’s field armies. The week discussed in Lincoln Takes Command has never been as heavily researched or told in such fine detail. The successes that crowned Lincoln’s short time in Hampton Roads offered him a better understanding of, and more confidence in, his ability to see what needed to be accomplished. This insight helped sustain him through the rest of the war.
Author: Steve Norder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611214574
Category : Hampton Roads, Battle of, Va., 1862
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
"The first study to detail the important week in March 1862 when, for the first and only time in the country's history, a sitting president took direct control of military forces, land and sea, to wage a campaign with wide-ranging consequences. Abraham Lincoln ordered a beach-landing to capture Norfolk, the shelling of major Confederate installations and defenses, and guiding naval assets that helped capture two important cities (Norfolk and Portsmouth) and the Gosport Navy Yard, the best of its kind along the entire Atlantic seaboard. Based on extensive primary sources, supported by original maps and photos, footnotes, biblio, appendices, and index."--
Author: John S. Tilley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780931709128
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Author: John S. Tilley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780931709036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
NOT JUST ANOTHER CIVIL WAR BOOK. Many books have been written about the causes of the Civil War; however "Lincoln Takes Command" is different in that it was researched & written by John S. Tilley, an attorney of national stature. Mr. Tilley spent many months in Washington searching records, many of which were piled in the corner of a warehouse mixed with other non-related records. The index is very complete & you will notice that the record is given from the original source such as Ida Tarbell & John G. Nicolay, Lincoln's secretaries, Secretary of State Seward & others who served as Lincoln's inner circle & knew exactly what transpired & when. The Confederate record is from correspondence of Jefferson Davis, the governor of South Carolina & other such sources that were on the scene at the time the drama unfolded. Many people agree that "Lincoln Takes Command" is the most accurate & best indexed book on the causes of the separation of the states. The open minded reader will find in Mr. Tilley's work much that will both surprise & enlighten him. "Lincoln Takes Command" is a classic classroom text. A necessity for any serious history student's library.
Author: Bruce Catton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504024214
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian’s “lively and absorbing” biography of Ulysses S. Grant and his leadership during the Civil War (The New York Times Book Review). This conclusion to Bruce Catton’s acclaimed history of General Grant begins in the summer of 1863. After Grant’s bold and decisive triumph over the Confederate Army at Vicksburg, President Lincoln promoted him to the head of the Army of the Potomac. The newly named general was virtually unknown to the Union’s military high command, but he proved himself in the brutal closing year and a half of the War Between the States. Grant’s strategic brilliance and unshakeable tenacity crushed the Confederacy in the battles of the Overland Campaign in Virginia and the Siege of Petersburg. In the spring of 1865, Grant finally forced Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, thus ending the bloodiest conflict on American soil. Although tragedy struck only days later when Lincoln—whom Grant called “incontestably the greatest man I have ever known”—was assassinated, Grant’s military triumphs would ensure that the president’s principles of unity and freedom would endure. In Grant Takes Command, Catton offers readers an in-depth portrait of an extraordinary warrior and unparalleled military strategist whose brilliant battlefield leadership saved an endangered Union.
Author: John F. Marszalek
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040643
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln called General Henry W. Halleck to Washington, D.C., to take command of all Union armies in the death struggle against the Confederacy. For the next two turbulent years, Halleck was Lincoln's chief war advisor, the man the President deferred to in all military matters. Yet, despite the fact that he was commanding general far longer than his successor, Ulysses S. Grant, he is remembered only as a failed man, ignored by posterity. In the first comprehensive biography of Halleck, the prize-winning historian John F. Marszalek recreates the life of a man of enormous achievement who bungled his most important mission. When Lincoln summoned him to the nation's capital, Halleck boasted outstanding qualifications as a military theorist, a legal scholar, a brave soldier, and a California entrepreneur. Yet in the thick of battle, he couldn't make essential decisions. Unable to produce victory for the Union forces, he saw his power become subsumed by Grant's emergent leadership, a loss that paved the way for Halleck's path to obscurity. Harnessing previously unused research, as well as the insights of modern medicine and psychology, Marszalek unearths the seeds of Halleck's fatal wartime indecisiveness in personality traits and health problems. In this brilliant dissection of a rich and disappointed life, we gain new understanding of how the key decisions of the Civil War were taken, as well as insight into the making of effective military leadership.
Author: David Gordon
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610166140
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 619
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Book Description
American Despots
Amazing low sale price in defense of authentic freedom as versus the presidency that betrayed it!
Everyone seems to agree that brutal dictators and despotic rulers deserve scorn and worse. But why have historians been so willing to overlook the despotic actions of the United States' own presidents? You can scour libraries from one end to the other and encounter precious few criticisms of America's worst despots.
The founders imagined that the president would be a collegial leader with precious little power who constantly faced the threat of impeachment. Today, however, the president orders thousands of young men and women to danger and death in foreign lands, rubber stamps regulations that throw enterprises into upheaval, controls the composition of the powerful Federal Reserve, and manages the priorities millions of swarms of bureaucrats that vex the citizenry in every way.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that the president embodies the Leviathan state as we know it. Or, more precisely, it is not an individual president so much as the very institution of the presidency that has been the major impediment of liberty. The presidency as the founders imagined it has been displaced by democratically ratified serial despotism. And, for that reason, it must be stopped.
Every American president seems to strive to make the historians' A-list by doing big and dramatic things—wars, occupations, massive programs, tyrannies large and small—in hopes of being considered among the "greats" such as Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. They always imagine themselves as honored by future generations: the worse their crimes, the more the accolades.
Well, the free ride ends with Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John Denson.
This remarkable volume (825 pages including index and bibliography) is the first full-scale revision of the official history of the U.S. executive state. It traces the progression of power exercised by American presidents from the early American Republic up to the eventual reality of the power-hungry Caesars which later appear as president in American history. Contributors examine the usual judgments of the historical profession to show the ugly side of supposed presidential greatness. 
The mission inherent in this undertaking is to determine how the presidency degenerated into the office of American Caesar. Did the character of the man who held the office corrupt it, or did the power of the office, as it evolved, corrupt the man? Or was it a combination of the two? Was there too much latent power in the original creation of the office as the Anti-Federalists claimed? Or was the power externally created and added to the position by corrupt or misguided men?
There's never been a better guide to everything awful about American presidents. No, you won't get the civics text approach of see no evil. Essay after essay details depredations that will shock you, and wonder how American liberty could have ever survived in light of the rule of these people.
Contributors include George Bittlingmayer, John V. Denson, Marshall L. DeRosa, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Lowell Gallaway, Richard M. Gamble, David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, Randall G. Holcombe, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Michael Levin, Yuri N. Maltsev, William Marina, Ralph Raico, Joseph Salerno, Barry Simpson, Joseph Stromberg, H. Arthur Scott Trask, Richard Vedder, and Clyde Wilson.
Author: Benton Rain Patterson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786478578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Lincoln's most controversial generals--his so-called "political generals"--were appointed, promoted or kept in service for political purposes without regard for their competence. "It seems but little better than murder," the Army's general in chief, Henry Halleck, protested, "to give important commands to such men." The book shows these seven generals--Butler, Banks, Sigel, Fremont, McClernand, Hurlbut and Wallace--in action, allowing readers to decide for themselves if Halleck was right in his withering assessment of Lincoln's political generals.
Author: Richard N. Current
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809000598
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
"Abraham Lincoln as politician, president, and human being comes to life in all the conflicts, paradoxes, and seeming contradictions that surround him. Packed with fascinating details, The Lincoln Nobody Knows is a study of the obscure and misunderstood facets of the great statesman's career and private life."--Back cover
Author: William Bruce Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811769364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
Lincoln’s First Crisis concerns five of the most consequential months in American history: December 1860 through April 1861. When Abraham Lincoln swore his oath as president, the United States was disintegrating. Seven states had seceded, and as many as eight seemed poised to join them, depending upon how the new president handled the secession crisis and its flashpoint: Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the heart of the rebellion. The fate of the republic hung in the balance. The Sumter crisis has been hotly debated and deeply researched for more than 150 years. In this thoughtful reassessment, William Bruce Johnson combines thorough research and the latest historiography with a litigator’s methodical analysis and a storyteller’s eye for meaningful detail. Shortly after taking office, Lincoln decided upon a plan to avoid war with the seceded states while keeping his inaugural promise to maintain a Union military presence in the South. Because he chose not to reveal his plan to anyone, rumors soon spread that he was simply afraid to act. One source of such rumors was Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward. Resentful that Lincoln had deprived him of the Republican nomination and convinced that Lincoln lacked the political sophistication necessary to deal with the secession crisis, Seward decided to negotiate with the Confederacy on his own and in secret. General Winfield Scott, meanwhile, the Union’s most senior military officer, had for a decade depended upon Seward for political advice, and now considered himself under orders from Seward, not the president. Johnson traces how Seward and Scott sabotaged Lincoln’s plan. From this account, from his examination of various personalities (such as that of Fort Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson), and from his granular research into aspects of the Order of Battle in Charleston, Johnson has here constructed a new narrative of this crucial period, culminating in a new theory of how and why the Civil War began as it did, and how and why, if the new president’s orders had been properly carried out by Seward and Scott, it might have been averted.
