Our History Ain't No Mystery

I've spent the better part of the year reading up on 19th century American history, a subject I have spent a lifetime avoiding. I can now say I'm smarter than the average bear regarding the period between 1815 and 1865, between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

The three books I've read, all of which I very highly recommend are:

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (2007) by Daniel Walker Howe
Battle Cry of Freedom (1987) by James McPherson
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Dorris Kearns Goodwin

Together, they comprise 2500 pages plus citations and indexes. I'm a slow, selective reader, and I consider each of them a page-turner.

The first two are part of the Oxford History of the United States series, and both won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Each of them presents a broad overview of the history of their respective periods.

Team of Rivals is more biographical, focusing on the Lincoln and his first-term cabinet: particularly W. Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Edwin Stanton. Each of these men had a legitimate claim to preeminence among their countrymen. All of them looked down on and dismissed Lincoln, "the rail spiller," when he was elected. All (with the possible exception of Chase, who clearly had "issues") came to regard him as the greatest man in the history of the Republic.

There's an anecdote at the end of the book that I really loved:

In 1908, in a wild an remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was a guest of a tribal chief "living far away from civilized life in the mountains." Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with the tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, "But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock... His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man."

I can now say: he really was that great, only better.