Download or read book Lincoln the Cabinet and the Generals written by Chester G. Hearn and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While numerous accounts exist of President Abraham Lincoln's often-troubled dealings with either his cabinet or his generals, Chester G. Hearn's illuminating history provides the first broad synthesis of Lincoln's complex relationship with both groups. As such, it casts new light on much of the behind-the-scenes interplay, intrigue, and sparring between the president and his advisors and military commanders during the most precarious years of the Civil War. Turning first to Lincoln's cabinet, Hearn explains that Lincoln exercised a unique decision-making process: he reached a firm conclusion on an issue, but then he debated it endlessly with his cabinet or generals as if still undecided. To ensure the liveliest discourse, Lincoln appointed as his advisors men with widely differing political motivations. The Republican Lincoln spent four years attempting to bring together his cabinet of former Whigs and Democrats in the spirit of cooperation, but he never completely achieved his purpose. Hearn explores the president's relationship with this cabinet, the problems he encountered selecting it, and the difficulties he experienced attempting to maintain ideological balance while trying to maneuver around those who disagreed with him. Lincoln never broached a subject that did not create some level of dissent within the cabinet, and differences in political philosophy and personal rivalries led to great debate over the running of the administration, the selection of generals, foreign relations and military mobilization, emancipation, freedom of the press, civil rights, and other issues. Still, Hearn asserts, Lincoln's ability to navigate internal scuffles and external turmoil helped to define his presidency. Hearn next demonstrates convincingly that even with these difficulties, Lincoln manipulated his cabinet far more adroitly than he did his generals. Many of Lincoln's top military commanders had political aspirations or agendas of their own, while others were close friends of his intransigent cabinet members. Having assumed the role as de facto army chief, Lincoln took responsibility for the mishandling of battles fought by his generals, some of whom were incompetent and unmanageable politicians. Hearn examines the often-disastrous generalship and its impact on Lincoln and the cabinet, as well as the public, the press, and Congress. Based on over a decade of research, Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Generals offers both a fresh perspective on and a new interpretation of Lincoln's presidency -- one that reveals the leadership genius as well as the imperfections of America's sixteenth president.

Download or read book Ways and Means written by Roger Lowenstein and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Download or read book Presidential Command written by Peter W. Rodman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An official in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bush administrations, Peter W. Rodman draws on his firsthand knowledge of the Oval Office to explore the foreign-policy leadership of every president from Nixon to George W. Bush. This riveting and informative book about the inner workings of our government is rich with anecdotes and fly-on-the-wall portraits of presidents and their closest advisors. It is essential reading for historians, political junkies, and for anyone in charge of managing a large organization.

Download or read book Abraham Lincoln s Cabinet written by Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Stanton written by Walter Stahr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Of the crucial men close to President Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) was the most powerful and controversial. Stanton raised, armed, and supervised the army of a million men who won the Civil War. He organized the war effort. He directed military movements from his telegraph office, where Lincoln literally hung out with him ... Now with this worthy complement to the enduring library of biographical accounts of those who helped Lincoln preserve the Union, Stanton honors the indispensable partner of the sixteenth president"--

Download or read book Lincoln and the Jews written by Jonathan D. Sarna and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.

Download or read book The Cabinet of Curiosities written by Douglas Preston and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of NPR's 100 Best Thrillers Ever, FBI agent Pendergast discovers thirty-six murdered bodies in a New York City charnel house . . . and now, more than a century later, a killer strikes again. In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies--all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun. Again.

Download or read book Team of Rivals written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most influential books of the past fifty years, Team of Rivals is Pulitzer Prize–winning author and esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political foes. Winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inspiration for the Oscar Award winning–film Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, directed by Steven Spielberg, and written by Tony Kushner. On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war. We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through. This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

Download or read book Seward written by Walter Stahr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most acclaimed new biographers--the first full life of the leader of Lincoln's "Team of Rivals"--William Henry Seward, one of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century.

Download or read book Lincoln Revisited written by Harold Holzer and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 2009, America celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and the pace of new Lincoln books and articles has already quickened. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to say about the greatest of our Presidents. Lincoln Revisited is a masterly guidePub to what’s new and what’s noteworthy in this unfolding story—a brilliant gathering of fresh scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. Brought together by The Lincoln Forum, they tackle uncharted territory and emerging questions; they also take a new look at established debates—including those about their own landmark works. Here, these well-known historians revisit key chapters in Lincoln’s legacy—from Matthew Pinsker on Lincoln’s private life and Jean Baker on religion and the Lincoln marriage to Geoffrey Perret on Lincoln as leader and Frank J. Williams on Lincoln and civil liberties in wartime. The eighteen original essays explore every corner of Lincoln’s world—religion and politics, slavery and sovereignty, presidential leadership and the rule of law, the Second Inaugural Address and the assassination. In his 1947 classic, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Herbert Donald confronted the Lincoln myth. Today, the scholars in Lincoln Revisited give a new generation of students, scholars, and citizens the perspectives vital for understanding the constantly reinterpreted genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Download or read book Lincoln s Mentors written by Michael J. Gerhardt and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and novel examination of how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership “Abraham Lincoln had less schooling than all but a couple of other presidents, and more wisdom than every one of them. In this original, insightful book, Michael Gerhardt explains how this came to be." –H.W. Brands, Wall Street Journal In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround? As Michael J. Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln’s reemergence followed the same path he had taken before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately—Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From their experiences and his own, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and—what would become his most enduring legacy—developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time. Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer—and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.

Download or read book No Ordinary Time written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and how it shaped the nation while steering it through the Great Depression and the outset of World War II. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.

Download or read book President Lincoln s Cabinet written by John Palmer Usher and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lincoln and His Cabinet written by Charles Anderson Dana and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Blood on the Moon written by Edward Steers and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-10-21 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.

Download or read book Rise to Greatness written by David Von Drehle and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Von Drehle has chosen a critical year ('the most eventful year in American history' and the year Lincoln rose to greatness), done his homework, and written a spirited account."N"Publishers Weekly."

Download or read book Lincoln s Other White House written by Elizabeth Smith Brownstein and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lincolns spent the summer of 1862 north of the White House at the Soldiers' Home. The lush, cool hill overlooking the squalid capital promised the Lincolns an escape from the ""city of stink."" Despite fears about Lincoln's vulnerability in the secluded place, Lincoln spent a quarter of his presidency at the Soldiers' Home. But until the National Trust for Historic Preservation began restoring the cottage, little had been done to explore this missing link in Lincoln's life. Elizabeth Smith Brownstein fills in a critical gap. Using diaries, letters, and eyewitness accounts, she provides unusual perspectives on Lincoln's relationships, traces the evolution of Lincoln's image, examines the Lincoln marriage, and more. Lincoln's Other White House is a vivid evocation of a turbulent era, and an intimate portrait of the still elusive president.