PositiveNew York Times Book Review[An] elegant, almost conversational, exposition ... Studding this story are abundant examples of Lincoln’s determination at war’s end to blend justice with reconciliation ... To read these chapters is to discover Lincoln’s rare compound of \'empathy, honesty, humor and humility\' ... These are not unfamiliar tales to students of Lincoln, but Avlon makes the retelling affecting and powerful. At the same time, Avlon plays down the highly ideological Lincoln. However much he preferred to avoid controversy, Lincoln relentlessly dedicated his political life to deploying a domestic agenda of tariffs, banking and economic infrastructure-building that deliberately overturned six decades of Democratic economic policy and set the country on a new path ... As much as Avlon is convinced that Lincoln’s \'commitment to reconciliation retains the force of revelation,\' Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is short on the exact content of that revelation for the postwar years ...Avlon is not wrong to see Lincoln favoring a reinvention of the South as a small-scale manufacturing economy to replace the plantation oligarchy that triggered the war. But Lincoln played his political cards so close to the chest that, beyond this, it is unclear exactly what directions he thought Reconstruction should take ... Avlon is right to offer us comfort from the fact that we have been at moments like this before, and survived. But Lincoln was not entirely the \'soulful centrist.\' And centrism, unhappily, did not spare us either a hideous civil war or a botched reconstruction.
Colin Woodard
PanThe Wall Street JournalColin Woodard, a journalist with the Portland Press Herald, believes that the whole idea of national unity has been a kind of mirage all along ... It is a striking thesis but not a plausible one ... At no point does Mr. Woodard ever explain why he has nominated Bancroft, Simms, Turner, Wilson and Dixon as the molders of American union. In any case, it is surpassing strange that he selects two Jacksonian Democrats (Bancroft and Simms) and three Progressive Democrats (Turner, Wilson and Dixon) as the voices of union when a substantial selection of Whigs, non-Progressives and even Federalists were available to explain American nationhood in very different terms than those of an \'ethnostate\' ... It is no help to the reader’s suspension of disbelief that Mr. Woodard’s narrative falls into so many historical potholes.
S. C. Gwynne
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe difficulty with vignettes is that, while Mr. Gwynne is a vivid miniaturist whose chapters could easily stand alone as their own short stories, it is easy to lose a sense of the overall arc of that desperate last war year and to miss the logic of dwelling on one thing and not another ... the battles that followed at the North Anna and at Cold Harbor are skimmed by in a sentence and a couple of paragraphs, respectively—despite the North Anna being one of Lee’s finest strokes of tactical genius and Cold Harbor being one of the most brutal and resultless battles of the war ... It’s not even clear what the book’s title means, since there are no hymns in it, and Julia Ward Howe’s famous lyrics are never drawn upon for their resonance with the title ... The same lack of coherence vexes Mr. Gwynne’s character portraits. Although he is frankly skeptical of what he deems Civil War mythology, his treatment of Grant pushes forward some of the weariest clichés ... Mr. Gwynne is at his most unpersuasive when he repeats the canard—beloved of both early 20th-century Progressives and modern neo-Confederates—that the war saw \'the rapid growth of a large, industrialized Northern nation\' and the creation of \'a highly centralized federal government\' ... Read as a rollicking series of short essays, Hymns of the Republic is both sympathetic and evocative. But good history requires more than that, including a deep dive into the sources, an immersion in the thought patterns of the past, and a sense of balance between the need for comprehensiveness and the sharp point of a story. Despite its literary virtues, Hymns of the Republic has none of these.
Eric Foner
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe strongest parts of \"The Fiery Trial\" lie at the very beginning, where Mr. Foner situates Lincoln in the context of the Republican ideology that the author wrote about 40 years ago, and at the very end, where Mr. Foner makes the transition to Reconstruction. In between, however, there is nothing particularly new in this elaboration of Lincoln\'s path to emancipation and abolition ... The book\'s errors can be forgiven. Less pardonable is the reduction of Lincoln\'s complex politics to fuzzy psychological concepts like \"growth,\" transforming the story of what was indeed a fiery political trial into a therapeutic fairy tale.
Tom Cotton
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThere is likely to be vanishingly little appeal to a book about a cemetery—unless, of course, the cemetery is Arlington, and the book’s chief cast of characters is Arlington’s storied Old Guard, and its author is a himself a former Old Guard member. In Tom Cotton’s Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery, these lofty criteria are met, and then some ... Sacred Duty is itself a kind of love story, with Arlington as its theater. It is about a love that reveres the American proposition that all men are created equal, a love that stands back-to-back on a dusty hill when all hope is gone and the ammo has run out, a love that throws itself on a grenade to save a buddy’s life.
Edward L. Ayers
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalEdward Ayers’s The Thin Light of Freedom is a kinder, gentler version of Civil War social history ...extends the story from Gettysburg into the Reconstruction era and features many of the individuals whom Mr. Ayers introduced in In the Presence of Mine Enemies...the dominant tone is regret ... Franklin and Augusta counties were active theaters of war, but military events are not Mr. Ayers’s long suit ...is beautifully, even spaciously written and paced at an adagio — an elegy for people trapped in webs of politics and war that they had, for the most part, spun for themselves ...may not quite persuade us that the evaporation of the war’s political and military history is easily acceptable, but does remind us that not everyone who fought or endured the war’s agonizing conflicts was a soldier.
