In The Review Queue: After Lincoln

After Lincoln:

How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace

by A. J. Langguth

A brilliant evocation of the post-Civil War era by the acclaimed author of Patriots and Union 1812. After Lincoln tells the story of the Reconstruction, which set back black Americans and isolated the South for a century.

With Lincoln’s assassination, his “team of rivals,” in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s phrase, was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson’s policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln’s closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver.

By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, “I’m afraid I’m elected.” His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by post-war greed and corruption during his two terms.

Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by the Radical Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

About the Author

A. J. Langguth is the author of eight books of nonfiction and three novels. After Lincoln marks his fourth book in a series that began in 1988 with Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. He was Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times and covered the Civil Rights Movement. He taught at the University of Southern California for twenty-seven years and retired in 2003 as emeritus professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  Mr. Langguth passed away on September 1, 2014 in his Hollywood home at the age of 81. You can read his obituary in the Los Angeles Times HERE.

ISBN 978-1451617320, Simon & Schuster, © 2014, Hardcover, 464 pages, Photographs, End Notes, Bibliography & Index. $28.00.  To purchase this book click HERE.