James M. McPherson

Evaluates Lincoln's talents as a commander in chief in spite of limited military experience, tracing the ways in which he worked with, or against, his senior commanders to defeat the Confederacy and reshape the presidential role.

Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book...

From the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy shows how Davis shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force and, like no other chief executive in American history, exercised a tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom, among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. Now, in this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the most enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history. McPherson sheds light on topics large...

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity, " as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

"In this compelling biography, McPherson follows Abraham Lincoln from his early frontier days through his turbulent years in the White House. Roused to action by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Lincoln joins the fledgling Republican Party. Running for U.S. Senate in 1858, he challenges Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas to a series of debates. Although Lincoln loses the race, his verbal jousts with Douglas give him the national attention necessary...

A series of essays on aspects of Lincoln as a military leader, the Civil War, and the changes in the South. James McPherson has emerged as one of America's finest historians. Battle Cry of Freedom, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times Book Review, called "history writing of the highest order." In that volume, McPherson gathered in the broad sweep of events, the political,...

Abraham Lincoln wondered whether "in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government." Jefferson Davis felt "forced to take up arms" to guarantee his states' rights. McPherson merges the words of these men and other political luminaries, housewives, and soldiers from both armies with his own concise analysis of the war to create a story as compelling as any novel.