RaveSlateIt’s hard to see Elizabeth Varon’s new biography of James Longstreet becoming a runaway bestseller, and that’s a shame, because her study of the Confederate general...is insightful, well-executed, and sorely needed ... Varon’s narrative bears out this familiar portrait of a worrying, wounded commander, even if she rejects previous scholars’ contention that this attitude impacted his performance in the field ... While Varon’s biography sags somewhat in detailing Longstreet’s maneuvering during the war and in recounting the various political offices he held in the decades long after it, the book comes to life narrating Longstreet’s activities during Reconstruction and analyzing his possible motives for accepting the outcome of the war. Alone among leading Confederates, he bowed to the North’s right to dictate the terms of peace.
Scott Shane
RaveThe Washington PostCombin[es] the best elements of rigorously researched history and thrilling narrative ... A gripping story told at a brisk pace in the no-fuss prose of a practiced reporter, is a model of the advantages that journalists can bring to the writing of history ... Only occasionally in this otherwise excellent book do some of Shane’s more editorializing comments grate ... The kind of story we sorely need at a time when there is no shortage of opportunities for inspiring acts of heroism.
James Oakes
MixedThe NationIn his exhumation of antislavery constitutionalism, Oakes unapologetically seeks to recover some kind of usable past ... This explication of the antislavery reading of the Constitution represents Oakes at his best, showing how clauses that seemed to protect slavery also opened, for a growing number of antislavery politicians, doors to its potential abolition ... A closer look at complications that Oakes glides over leads one to wonder how consensual the federal consensus really was. Given his objections to how some scholars collapse important distinctions and suggest unanimities that never really existed, it’s striking that he sometimes does the same thing, downplaying disagreements within the antislavery movement over what policies the federal consensus allowed and what the Antislavery Project could therefore do ... Oakes is masterful in showing how...two principles shaped Lincoln’s actions once the fighting commenced ... What is less convincing, however, is Oakes’s insistence that the Antislavery Project as instituted remained \'substantially unchanged\' from before the war.
