The transatlantic slave trade played a major role in the development of the modern world. It both gave birth to and resulted from the shift from feudalism into the European Commercial Revolution. James A. Rawley fills a scholarly gap in the historical discussion of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by providing one volume covering the economics, demography, epidemiology, and politics of the trade. This revised edition of Rawley's classic, produced with the assistance of Stephen D. Behrendt, includes emended text to reflect the major changes in historiography; current slave trade data tables and accompanying text; updated notes; and the addition of a select bibliography. James A. Rawley (1916-2005) was Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of several books, including Turning Points of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, both available in Bison Books editions. Stephen D. Behrendt is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He has coauthored a data archive of 27,233 slave voyages, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.

"I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons. And yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you." With this opening sentence in a two-page letter from Abraham Lincoln, Union general Joseph Hooker (1814-79) gained a prominent place in Civil War history. Hooker assumed command of an army demoralized by defeat and diminished by desertion. Acting swiftly, the general reorganized his army, routed corruption among quartermasters, improved food and sanitation, and boosted morale by granting furloughs and amnesties. His hour of fame and the test of his military skill came in the May 1863 battle of Chancellorsville. It was one of the Union Army's worst defeats; shortly thereafter Hooker's resignation was accepted. This definitive biography of a man who could lead so brilliantly and yet fall so ignominiously remains the only full-length treatment of Hooker's life. His renewal as an important commander in the western theater during the Chattanooga and Atlanta campaigns is discussed, as is his life before and after his Civil War military service. In a new introduction James A. Rawley, Carl Adolph Happold Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Nebraska, reminds today's readers of Fighting Joe's place in history.

The transatlantic slave trade played a major role in the development of the modern world. It both gave birth to and resulted from the shift from feudalism into the European Commercial Revolution. James A. Rawley fills a scholarly gap in the historical discussion of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by providing one volume covering the economics, demography, epidemiology, and politics of the trade. This revised edition of Rawley's classic, produced with the assistance of Stephen D. Behrendt, includes emended text to reflect the major changes in historiography; current slave trade data tables and accompanying text; updated notes; and the addition of a select bibliography. James A. Rawley is Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of several books, including Turning Points of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For, both available in Bison Books editions. Stephen D. Behrendt is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He has coauthored a data archive of 27,233 slave voyages, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.

The many sides of Abraham Lincoln--war leader, humorist, commander in chief, politician, and emancipator--are vividly depicted in this concise and fresh look at his presidential years. Pivotal events, decisions, and issues in Lincoln's private and public life are scrutinized and explained clearly by noted historian James A. Rawley. During an innovative yet bloody era marked by mass communication, unheard-of national recognition and media attention, and the increasingly destructive uses of technology to wage war, Lincoln did all that he could to preserve the nation as a whole. Principles underpinning Lincoln's actions and motivations as administrator and war leader included an abiding spirit of nationalism, which contrasted with the forces driving his immediate predecessors, and the encompassing power conferred upon him as commander in chief in wartime. Accessible and informative, "Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For" is an engaging and valuable introduction to the career of one of our most memorable presidents.

An associate of Abraham Lincoln offers an intimate view of the president's relations with military men and top politicians, placing particular emphasis on the election campaigns of 1860 and 1864.A. K. McClure, a Republican powerbroker and later editor of the Philadelphia Times, reveals how Lincoln replaced Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with the southern Democrat Andrew Johnson on the 1864 ticket. According to McClure, Lincoln kept his hand hidden in order not to offend Hamlin and his New England supporters. In 1892, the publication of Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-Times caused an angry exchange of letters (included in this edition) between McClure and the late president's secretary, John G. Nicolay.For all his nobility, Lincoln was a shrewd and cautious politician, running scared for reelection until major Union army victories in September 1864. McClure writes candidly about William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and George B. McClellan. Among the politicians discussed are Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, who fixed the Southern policy that Lincoln followed until war came; Salmon P. Chase, the annoyingly ambitious secretary of the treasury; Edwin M. Stanton, the moody secretary of war; and Thaddeus Stevens, the ferocious congressman whose relations with Lincoln were uneasy at best.James A. Rawley is Carl Adolph Happold Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of Turning Points of the Civil War, also available as a Bison Book.

As the Civil War raged, President Abraham Lincoln spent many hours in the War Department's telegraph office, where he received all his telegrams. Morning, noon, and night Lincoln would visit the small office to receive the latest news from the armies at the front. The place was a refuge for the president, who waited for incoming dispatches and talked while they were being deciphered. David Homer Bates, one of the first military telegraphers, recollects those presidential visits during times of crisis. "Lincoln in the Telegraph Office," originally published in 1907, shows history in the making and personalities at their most unguarded: Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Andrew Carnegie, General George McClellan, and many others. The reader is with Lincoln at the scene of dramatic tidings: of the Northern disasters at Bull Run, of Meade's victory at Gettysburg, of Grant's capture of Richmond. Lincoln wrote the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation at the telegraph office, and from there the news of his assassination was relayed. Wartime human-interest anecdotes, the wonder of the new technology, the unraveling of ciphers and codes, conspiracies and rumors, a heightened sense of onrushing events, the tragedy of Good Friday 1865--all are conveyed in this classic of Lincolniana.

Abraham Lincoln "was a tall, spare man, with large bones, and towering up to six feet and four inches. He leaned forward, and stooped as he walked. . . . There was no grace in his movements, but an expression of awkwardness, combined with force and vigor. By nature he was diffident, and when in crowds, not speaking and conscious of being observed, he seemed to shrink with bashfulness. . . . His forehead was broad and high, his hair was rather stiff and coarse, and nearly black, his eye-brows heavy, his eyes dark grey, clear, very expressive, and varying with every mood, now sparkling with humor and fun, then flashing with wit; stern with indignation at wrong and injustice, then kind and genial, and then again dreamy and melancholy."

Isaac N. Arnold's word picture owes everything to personal observation because he knew Abraham Lincoln well for a quarter of a century. Eventually an adviser to the sixteenth president, Arnold attended his inaugurations, heard his great speeches, visited him at the White House, and on a spring day in 1865 joined the procession that carried his slain body there. Twenty years later he published his biography giving a detailed sense of Lincoln the entertaining storyteller, the shrewd politician, the steadfast visionary.

Here is the story of Lincoln's rise from humble origins to the presidency, backgrounded by events leading inexorably to the Civil War. Boyhood in Kentucky and Indiana, legal and legislative experiences, marriage to Mary Todd, name-making debates with Stephen Douglas, struggles as president to end slavery and shore up the union, conduct of Northern forces as commander-in-chief, murder at Ford's Theater--all fuel the narrative drive of "The Life of Abraham Lincoln."

When President-elect Abraham Lincoln was preparing to go to Washington he appealed to his old friend and law partner Ward Hill Lamon: "I want you to go along with me. . . . In fact I must have you. So get yourself ready and come along." Lamon journeyed from Springfield to Washington in 1861 and returned to Illinois in mourning in 1865. Lincoln chose Lamon as his bodyguard when he slipped into Washington by night to foil conspirators intent on murder. The president sent him on missions and appointed him marshal of the District of Columbia. During that time of civil war Lincoln was often dispirited, and Lamon tried to cheer him.

These recollections were compiled from Lamon's notes and papers by his daughter, Dorothy, and published in 1895. The expanded second edition of 1911 has been used for this reprinting. "Recollections of Abraham Lincoln" has often been cited for its firsthand testimony about key episodes and incidents, including at the phantom-like train trip to Washington in 1861, a visit to Charleston during the secession crisis, and Lincoln's foreboding dreams.

As James A. Rawley points out in his introduction, Lamon's recollections of Lincoln's personal qualities an presidency are important to history.

"The best general account of politics in the North," as David Herbert Donald calls this book, is also the first one-volume history of its subject. Abraham Lincoln's single goal of saving the Union required not simply subduing the South but contending as well with divisiveness in the North--with refractory state officials, draft resisters, peace advocates, secret organizations, with Northern Democrats (too often seen only as Copperheads or as traitors to the Union), and with powerful Republicans who often vocally disagreed with Lincoln's policies. In this account, Radical Republicans represent consensus with Lincoln more than conflict, sectional more than economic interests, and party over faction. Largely, dissent was heard and accommodated; and, if the federal legislation of the time did amount to a Second American Revolution, it emerged from the conflicts, within the North as well as against the South, of a nation at war. The outcome was a nation not only saved but strengthened and slavery ended.

Race and Politics offers an analysis of the controversies that followed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The question of whether the still unsettled Kansas Territory should be slave or free divided the nation into hostile and ultimately irreconcilable camps, creating conditions that only civil war could resolve. The author demonstrates, however, that the fundamental issue was not slavery as such but race: whether the country, its egalitarian slogans notwithstanding, could tolerate the expansion of African Americans, slave or free. "Rawley in his introduction, a semi-apologia, questions the need for another book on the Civil War. He answers his own question, giving two reasons: first, to reveal how the Kansas upheaval became a main political preoccupation of the country before the war; second, to emphasize how deeply prejudice pervaded the entire populace, both Northern and Southern. In filling in the structure of these two justifications, Rawley achieves his goal in an admirable way."-Gene M. Gressley, Library Journal. "Based to a considerable degree upon an examination of voluminous manuscript sources. New data relating to inner-political maneuvers, on the part of the Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans are brought forward."-Annals of the American Academy. James A. Rawley is Carl Adolph Happold Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of numerous books, including Turning Points of the Civil War (Nebraska 1989), The Politics of Union: Northern Politics during the Civil War (Nebraska 1974), Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For (Nebraska 2003), and Secession: The Disruption of the American Republic, 1844-1861.