Recent reading: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Prima/Forum, 2002). Despite the title, this book is less about Lincoln himself than about his ambition, Republican policy in general, and the conduct of the war.
It needed a better editor; certain phrases turn up several times in a chapter, such as “at the end of his rope militarily” (Lincoln in 1862). But such tics fade in the second half.
The author’s libertarianism is embarrassingly shrill at times. On the other hand, given the thesis — that the leader of the pork-barrel party broke every clause of the Bill of Rights, murdered thousands, left a legacy of corruption, and got a halo for it — it’s not surprising that he should take Garrison’s attitude:
I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.
Some questions never addressed: If the legitimacy of secession was never seriously questioned before Lincoln, and was standard doctrine at West Point, why are no officers other than Lee mentioned as questioning the invasion? If the secession was (as this writer argues) all about taxes, why did the seceding parties say it was all about slavery?
But I did learn a thing or two: lots of juicy quotes here; and this is the first I’ve heard that, before the Fort Sumter incident, Davis sent Lincoln a delegation to make a deal for purchase of Federal property in the South and for the Southern share of the Federal debt — and Lincoln refused to see them.