"1864" by Charles Flood

This book looks amazing! In a history class two semesters ago, I was asked to do a project over a major person in history that is dead, that I would bring back for one hour and why, and have a list of questions for this person. (I know, kinda weird. It was fun though.) Good 'ole Honest Abe was my #1 pick. Everything about his nature and tactics to his marriage and children are fascinating to me. I am really excited about this book - it has been added to my "must read" list. (This is literally a list I keep near my computer taped to the wall, like a grocery list.) I am looking forward to checking out the unique approach the author is taking to capture the "most important time" of Lincoln's life.

By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 8, 2009
It was in 1864, perhaps the most punishing year of his presidency, that Abraham Lincoln made one of his most unforgettable admissions. “This war is eating my life out,” he said on Feb. 6, even though the grueling challenges of that year were just beginning. During the following months Lincoln would navigate the political pressures of a tough election, fend off a Confederate military invasion of Washington during which he was a target for snipers, and back up the Emancipation Proclamation with a constitutional amendment. He would also thwart attempts at domestic terrorism and deal with a steady parade of citizens who could freely visit him at the White House, often telling war stories that brought this already melancholy man to tears.



Charles Bracelen Flood
1864
Lincoln at the Gates of History
By Charles Bracelen Flood
Illustrated. 521 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.

Lincoln Monuments (February 8, 2009)
Times Topics: Abraham Lincoln
One of his secretaries, William O. Stoddard, tried to shield Lincoln from the worst of his hate mail. “Stories of partisan bitterness and personal hatred; of the most venomous malice, seeking to shoot with poisoned arrows of abuse; of low, slanderous meannesses; of the coarsest, foulest vulgarity to which beastly men can sink; of the wildest, fiercest and the most obscene ravings of utter insanity” — Stoddard helped keep all this away from him. Even so, Lincoln was well aware of being savaged by detractors whose commentary amounted to a 19th-century version of talk radio.
By focusing a book entirely on the tactical maneuvers that got Lincoln through 1864, the historian Charles Bracelen Flood makes a smart tactical choice of his own. The bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth will occur on Thursday, and it has brought forth a tidal wave of new opining about Lincoln. Some historians have opted for overviews of Lincoln’s life; others have cordoned off specialty areas like Lincoln’s writing, military leadership, marriage, staff members and pre-presidency. But the survey books can be superficial. And the narrow-turf studies can suffer from tunnel vision. Mr. Flood’s “1864” compresses the multiple demands upon Lincoln into a tight time frame and thus captures a dizzying, visceral sense of why this single year took such a heavy toll.
It takes many different kinds of expertise in order to do 1864 full justice. And Mr. Flood’s versatility is impressive. He analyzes Lincoln’s consummate political canniness in benching potential rivals for the presidency like Salmon Portland Chase (who eventually became chief justice of the United States and wound up swearing in his rival for a second term). He relives the great battles of 1864, with particular emphasis on how difficult it could be for the commander in chief to know where his armies were or what they were doing. He conveys Lincoln’s versatile approach to crisis management through broad and anecdotal evidence. Mr. Flood describes how Lincoln could physically eject annoying visitors from his office — even, on one occasion, when the annoying visitor was Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s high-strung, shopaholic wife.
This book is no exercise in hagiography. It addresses Lincoln’s wartime suspension of the right of habeas corpus in order to silence antiwar protesters. It describes the political patronage that Lincoln wholeheartedly dispensed to allies and friends. Part of the immediacy of “1864” stems from its many uncomfortable parallels between Lincoln’s time, when the government could overpay its contractors outrageously for useless cavalry horses or shoddy muskets, and our own. The real threat of domestic terrorism (engineered by antiwar Copperhead Democrats loyal to Clement Vallandigham, a Lincoln antagonist living in exile in Canada) is another link between 1864 and today.
Besieged as he was by war news and election strategy in 1864, Lincoln also had to deal with many auxiliary problems. The sheer weight and complexity of these matters, ranging from the efforts of Napoleon III to establish a French presence in Mexico to considering conditions under which the South might someday re-enter the American political process, are all part of this book’s overview. So are the big battles of 1864, most notably the July Confederate assault on Fort Stevens in northwest Washington This dramatic fight was made even more so by its taking place within sight of the Capitol, and with Lincoln watching from a parapet at Fort Stevens, making himself a visible target. Among the other battles vividly described here are those of the Wilderness, the Crater, Cedar Creek and Cold Harbor.
“1864” tries to effect a balance between Lincoln’s intensely pressured inner life and the huge, sweeping events that occurred around him. And Mr. Flood, whose other books include “Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War,” brings a ready assurance to describing the major external events of 1864. He writes knowledgeably yet intimately, and with a vigorous sense of what it must have been like to experience such serial crises each day. His close-range glimpses of Lincoln are more insightful than his larger sense of how the war and election unfolded beyond him. Mr. Flood succeeds in making Lincoln’s headaches his own.
Mr. Flood is never didactic. He appreciates Lincoln’s acumen without attempting to extract lessons and homilies from the Lincoln story. Mr. Flood establishes his subject’s greatness by contrasting it with the same man’s weaknesses, among them his sometimes ill-timed levity, a counterpart to his deep melancholia, and his harsh ideas about American Indians. (These were even harsher than some of his early, opportunistic calculations about how and where to resettle onetime slaves.)
The Lincoln of “1864” is engaged in a nonstop balancing act. The book is as adept at analyzing Lincoln’s choices as at showing what they meant to his ravaged nation.