In the summer of 1864, the American Civil War had been dragging on for over three years with no end in sight. Things had not gone well for the Union, and the public blamed the president for the stalemate against the Confederacy and for the appalling numbers of killed and wounded. Lincoln was thoroughly convinced that without a favorable change in the trajectory of the war he would have no chance of winning a second term against former Union general George B. McClellan, whom he had previously dismissed as commander of the Army of the Potomac. This vivid, engrossing account of a critical year in American history examines the events of 1864, when the course of American history might have taken a radically different direction. It's no exaggeration to say that if McClellan had won the election, everything would have been different-McClellan and the Democrats planned to end the war immediately, grant the South its independence, and let the Confederacy keep its slaves. What were the crucial factors that in the end swung public sentiment in favor of Lincoln? Johnson focuses on the battlefield campaigns of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. While Grant was waging a war of attrition with superior manpower against the quick and elusive rebel forces under General Robert E. Lee, Sherman was fighting a protracted battle in Georgia against Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. But then the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, made a tactical error that would change the whole course of the war. This lively narrative, full of intriguing historical facts, brings to life an important series of episodes in our nation's history. History and Civil War buffs will not want to put down this real-life page-turner.

This day-by-day account of Abraham Lincoln's last six weeks of life covers a period of extraordinary events, not only for the president himself but for the fate of the nation.From March 4 to April 15, 1865--a momentous time for the nation--Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, supervised climatic battles leading up to the end of the Civil War, learned that Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, and finally was killed by assassin John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. Weaving an arresting narrative around the historical facts, historian David Alan Johnson brings to life the president's daily routine, as he guided the country through one of the most tumultuous periods of American history.The reader follows the president as he greets visitors at the inaugural ball, asks abolitionist Frederick Douglass's opinion of the inaugural address, confers with Generals Grant and Sherman on the final stages of the war, visits a field hospital for wounded outside City Point, Virginia, and attempts to calm his high-strung wife Mary, who appears on the verge of nervous collapse. We read excerpts from press reviews of Lincoln's second inaugural address, learn that Mrs. Lincoln's ball gown created a sensation, and are given eye-witness accounts of the celebrations and drunken revelry that broke out in Washington when the end of the war was announced.This engagingly written narrative history of a short but extremely important span of days vividly depicts the actions and thoughts of one of our greatest presidents during a time of national emergency.

"Founding the Far West" is an ambitious and vividly written narrative of the early years of statehood and statesmanship in three pivotal western territories. Johnson offers a model example of a new approach to history that is transforming our ideas of how America moved west, one that breaks the mold of "regional" and "frontier" histories to show why Western history is also American history.
Johnson explores the conquest, immigration, and settlement of the first three states of the western region. He also investigates the building of local political customs, habits, and institutions, as well as the socioeconomic development of the region. While momentous changes marked the Far West in the later nineteenth century, distinctive local political cultures persisted. These were a legacy of the pre-Civil War conquest and settlement of the regions but no less a reflection of the struggles for political definition that took place during constitutional conventions in each of the three states.
At the center of the book are the men who wrote the original constitutions of these states and shaped distinctive political cultures out of the common materials of antebellum American culture. "Founding the Far West" maintains a focus on the individual experience of the constitution writers--on their motives and ambitions as pioneers, their ideological intentions as authors of constitutions, and the successes and failures, after statehood, of their attempts to give meaning to the constitutions they had produced.