Abraham Lincoln. War Years. Sandburg.

Abraham Lincoln: The War Years 1861-1865. Carl Sandburg. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1924.

Why read it? An understanding of Lincoln’s principles of leadership in the Civil War and the profound change in the future of America because he was assassinated

A Sample of Ideas. In Louisville, one company of recruits was going to the Union army. On the other side of the street a company of recruits was going to the Confederate army. One railroad car was filled with Union troops, another car was filled with Confederate troops. People were gaining fortunes at the expense of the men who were dying. Jackson carried a Bible and a book of Napoleon’s maxims on war. Lincoln’s paramount objects was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery. God can’t be for one party and the other; quite possible God has some other purpose than either party. Fredericksburg: total Confederate losses 5,309; Union, 12,653.

Lady do-gooder gave a wounded soldier a tract against dancing and he laughed. Both his legs had been shot off. Lincoln: He can put the most words into the smallest ideas. Any man with $300 could buy his freedom from the draft, a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Both Meade and Lee prayed to the same God that they would mangle and eviscerate each other. On the “Gettysburg Address”: silly, flat, dishwatery utterances. Dull and commonplace. Everett to Lincoln: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.” Lincoln understood politics because he understood human nature.

“Don’t duck; they couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance,” just before taking a bullet in his brain from a Southern sharpshooter. Jefferson Davis: Not fighting for slavery but for our right to self-government. Sheridan: a daredevil who made his men want to be daredevils. Lincoln used stories to cure a drooping friend, his own melancholy, to clinch an argument, to reveal a fallacy, to disarm an antagonist. Lincoln remembered good stories, but he never made any of them up himself. Whitman: At the foot of a tree a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. “a full load for a one-horse cart.”

Quote. Lincoln: “For my own part, I consider the first necessity that is upon us, is of proving that popular government is not an absurdity…must settle this question now—whether in a free government the minority have the right to break it up whenever they choose; if we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

Another quote: “For Abraham Lincoln it is lights out, good night, farewell—and a long farewell to the good earth and its trees, its enjoyable companions, and the Union of States and the world family of Man he has loved.”