Alphabetical entries provide information on Lincoln's life, ideas, contemporaries, and presidency

The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia

Neely, Mark E.

Biographies & Memoirs

McGraw=Hill

The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century slaughter and carnage. In challenging this view, Mark E. Neely, Jr., considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limits that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen.
Neely begins by contrasting Civil War behavior with U.S. soldiers' experiences in the Mexican War of 1846. He examines Price's Raid in Missouri for evidence of deterioration in the restraints imposed by the customs of war; and in a brilliant analysis of Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign, he shows that the actions of U.S. cavalrymen were selective and controlled. The Mexican war of the 1860s between French imperial forces and republicans provided a new yardstick for brutality: Emperor Maximilian's infamous Black Decree threatened captured enemies with execution. Civil War battles, however, paled in comparison with the unrestrained warfare waged against the Plains Indians. Racial beliefs, Neely shows, were a major determinant of wartime behavior.
Destructive rhetoric was rampant in the congressional debate over the resolution to avenge the treatment of Union captives at Andersonville by deliberately starving and freezing to death Confederate prisoners of war. Nevertheless, to gauge the events of the war by the ferocity of its language of political hatred is a mistake, Neely argues. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction

History

Americas

Harvard University Press

Over one hundred prints and photographs document the efforts of printmakers who attempted to make Lincoln's face immediately recognizable in a time when newspaper photographs were nonexistant

The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print

Arts & Photography

Holzer, Harold

Boritt, Gabor S.

Graphic Design

Scribner

The Civil War officially ended at Appomattox soon after President Lincoln’s second inauguration. During his first term he had been widely viewed by special-interest groups as a good-natured, indecisive bungler, and worse. In the South he was still despised, and many in the North, especially the radicals in the Republican party, distrusted and derided his leniency toward the vanquished. On the evening of April 14, 1865, an assassin’s bullet irrevocably altered the way Abraham Lincoln would be viewed by Americans. In life a cunning politician, Lincoln became in death a selfless martyr. Lloyd Lewis explicates the mythology that evolved out of Lincoln’s death, the outpouring of national grief, the pursuit of John Wilkes booth and the conspirators, booth’s fate, and the frequent moving and reburial of Lincoln’s coffin.

The Assassination of Lincoln: History and Myth

Lewis, Lloyd

Univ of Nebraska Pr

First published in 1987, The Confederate Image examines the popular lithographs and engravings cherished by Southerners during and after the Civil War. These images helped sustain and revive Southern identity following the collapse of the Confederacy. (Though, ironically, most were actually crafted by Northern artisans.) The book focuses on prints of the three most prominent Southern figures of the conflict--Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson--but also discusses prints of other important Confederates as well as the contributions of the short-lived Southern Illustrated News. "A well-researched and interesting sidelight into a world of illusion.--New York Times Book Review "More than just a picture book. . . . [It] tells a fascinating story of the creation of these images and how they added to or, at times, ran counter to the creation of the myth that is known as the Lost Cause.--Chicago Tribune

The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Civil War America)

Travel

The University of North Carolina Press

During the American Civil War, popular prints were frequently used to depict, define, and celebrate both the Union and Confederate causes. The Union Image explores the graphic arts that portrayed the Northern side--both in patriotic pictures and newsworthy illustrations published while the war raged and in retrospective images issued years later as major weapons in the postwar battle to shape the national memory. Created not for connoisseurs but for ordinary Americans, these engravings and lithographs depicted battles, commanders, life in camp and on campaign, the sacrifices of home and hearth, and an election campaign that roiled the North in the midst of the war. This volume reproduces nearly 150 original prints, allowing readers to trace changes in Northern public opinion, from Northerners' early high hopes for success to their appreciation for the ultimate victors, the "real men of war," Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.

The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Civil War America)

History & Criticism

The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival. Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)

The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Univ of North Carolina Pr

On the day Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate authorities, General Braxton Bragg reacted to a newspaper report that might have revealed the position of gun emplacements by placing the correspondent, a Southern loyalist, under arrest. Thus the Confederate army's first detention of a citizen occurred before President Lincoln had even called out troops to suppress the rebellion. During the civil war that followed, not a day would pass when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners.
Based on the discovery of records of over four thousand of these prisoners, Mark E. Neely Jr.'s new book undermines the common understanding that Jefferson Davis and the Confederates were scrupulous in their respect for constitutional rights while Lincoln and the Unionists regularly violated the rights of dissenters. Neely reveals for the first time the extent of repression of Unionists and other civilians in the Confederacy, and uncovers and marshals convincing evidence that Southerners were as ready as their Northern counterparts to give up civil liberties in response to the real or imagined threats of wartime.
From the onset of hostilities, the exploits of drunken recruits prompted communities from Selma to Lynchburg to beg the Richmond government to impose martial law. Southern citizens resigned themselves to a passport system for domestic travel similar to the system of passes imposed on enslaved and free blacks before the war. These restrictive measures made commerce difficult and constrained religious activity. As one Virginian complained, "This struggle was begun in defence of Constitutional Liberty which we could not get in the United States." The Davis administration countered that the passport system was essential to prevent desertion from the army, and most Southerners accepted the passports as a necessary inconvenience, ignoring the irony that the necessities of national mobilization had changed their government from a states'-rights confederacy to a powerful, centralized authority.
After the war the records of men imprisoned by this authority were lost through a combination of happenstance and deliberate obfuscation. Their discovery and subtle interpretation by a Pulitzer Prize&amp;emdash;winning historian explodes one of the remaining myths of Lost Cause historiography, revealing Jefferson Davis as a calculated manipulator of the symbols of liberty.

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

University of Virginia Press

The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival.Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Neely, Mark E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Neely, Mark E.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Neely, Mark E.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction

The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print

The Assassination of Lincoln: History and Myth

The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (Civil War America)

The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Civil War America)

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)

The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause

Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism

Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)