Abraham Lincoln
To Field an Army: A Short History of the Draft
By Mike HaskewThe call of a nation on its civilian population either to create a military force or to augment a standing army is virtually as old as civilization itself. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President of the United States during the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was in office during perhaps the most critical time in the nation’s history and provided exceptional leadership. Lincoln is remembered as a man of wit and strategic vision. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is among the nation’s most treasured documents of freedom along with his Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, which freed slaves in territories in revolt against the United States. Abraham Lincoln was mortally wounded by assassin John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, and died the following morning at the age of 56.
Abraham Lincoln
War So Terrible: The Battle of Fredericksburg
By Arnold BlumbergWord spread like wildfire through the camps of the Army of the Potomac during the second week of November 1862: “Little Mac” was out, “Old Burn” was in. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Prisons of the Civil War: An Enduring Controversy
By Michael E. HaskewThe June 19, 1861, editorial in the Charleston Mercury newspaper warned: “War is bloody reality, not butterfly sporting. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War
By Al HemingwayShortly after midnight on the morning of April 12, 1861, four men in a rowboat made their way across the pitch-black harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, toward an unfinished and architecturally insignificant masonry fort three miles out from the city where the harbor meets the Atlantic Ocean. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Rose O’Neal Greenhow: The Spy Who Won Bull Run
By David Alan Johnson“But for you, there would have been no Battle of Bull Run.” When Confederate President Jefferson Davis made that blanket statement in the summer of 1862, he was not addressing Pierre G.T. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
West Virginia: Seceding from the Confederacy
By Don RobertsDuring the Civil War western Virginia was crucial to the Union. The region that lay west of the Shenandoah Valley and north of the Kanawha River held nearly a quarter of Virginia’s nonslave population when the war began in 1861. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Battle of Richmond, Kentucky: Cannae in the Bluegrass State
By Pedro GarciaOn September 7, 1862, Colonel Walter Taylor of General Robert E. Lee’s staff wrote to his sister: “The Yankee papers of the 6th exhibit a gloomy picture for our enemy. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Ambrose Powell Hill: His Greatest Action at the Battle of Antietam
By William E. WelshBy mid-afternoon on September 17, 1862, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were locked in mortal combat on the rolling hills overlooking the sluggish waters of Antietam Creek in northwestern Maryland. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The Heroism of Vision: Photographs from the Battlefield
By Al HemingwayOn the morning of February 23, 1945, on the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima, a 40-man patrol gathered at the 5th Marine Division headquarters for their final briefing with battalion commander Lt. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The Creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission
By Lawrence WeberIn the spring of 1861, a group of influential northern men and women, led by Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows and social reformer Dorothea Dix, met in New York City to discuss the formation of a sanitary commission, modeled after the British Sanitary Commission established during the Crimean War, to provide relief to sick and wounded soldiers in the Union Army. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Wilson’s Creek: Bull Run of the West
By Joshua van DereckAt the beginning of 1861, Missouri was in turmoil. A slave state since its inception in 1820, Missouri had grown increasingly tied to urban industry. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The Main Civil War Generals Who Helped Define the War
By Roy Morris, Jr.Mr. Morris is the author of seven well-received books on 19th Century American history and literature. He has served as a consultant for A&E, the History Channel, and edited a three-book series for Purdue University Press on American Civil War and post-Civil War history, journalism and literature. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Daniel Morgan at the Battle of Cowpens
By James K. SwisherAt last, students of American military history have recently been accorded some measure of respect to the tactical genius of Daniel Morgan. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
American Civil War Timeline: Piecemeal Operations
by William E. WelshU.S. President Abraham Lincoln had no military experience and discarded most of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan, which critics deemed too conservative. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The American Civil War: Forging a National Identity
by Mike HaskewThe American Civil War was the tragic culmination of divergent perspectives on the proper conduct of the government of the United States and socio-economic issues that had been frequently at the forefront of American political life for decades. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant: Union War Hero
by Mike HaskewBorn in Ohio in 1822, Ulysses S. Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1843. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln vs. Frémont and His “Hasty Emancipation”
As the early days of the American Civil War were unfolding and the destiny of the republic was being contested on the battlefield, President Abraham Lincoln was engaged in a no less perilous type of battle. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
Looking Back on the Vicksburg Campaign
Brooke C. StoddardWhen the sun set on the Confederacy, the stars began to rise and shine, none more brightly for Northerners than that of Abraham Lincoln, and for Southerners than those of Robert E. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The Post-Civil War Frontier American Army
By Eric NiderostIn 1864-1865 the U.S. Army had some 1,045,000 men in uniform; within a year after Appomattox, the number stood at 57,000. Read more
Abraham Lincoln
The Gallant 4th Army Regulars at the Battle of Gettysburg
When the American Civil War erupted in April 1861, the 10 companies of the 4th U.S. Infantry were spread along the West Coast from Puget Sound to the Gulf of California in various small, far-flung garrisons. Read more
