The Top Selling Civil War Era Books of 2020

According to Civil War Monitor the top selling books about the Civil War Era over the last year include some popular histories, a few scholarly books, and some crackpot stuff. Here are the most popular books over the last year in terms of sales based on Bookscan stats. As with “Top 10” lists published before the end of the years, this list ignores the last months of our Year of Covid.

The Number 1 book was Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s new book The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America’s 16^th President-and Why It Failed. You may ask yourself: “It failed? So why do people visit Ford’s Theater?” This book is not about THAT assassination plot. It is about the 1861 Baltimore Plot. I have not read the book yet, but it has garnered generally good reviews. Here is how the Washington Post described the book:

Drawing from contemporaneous accounts and biographies of the central characters, Meltzer and Mensch use Lincoln’s two-week journey by train from his home in Illinois to his under-cover-of-darkness arrival in Washington as a gripping narrative to revisit the discovery of the assassination plot and the frantic efforts to prevent its success.

In their briskly paced telling — each of the book’s 81 chapters is just a few pages long — the authors provide a robust historical framework and explain how a figure named Cypriano Ferrandini, a barber to Baltimore’s elite and a staunch supporter of the slaveholding South, would come to be seen as the lead organizer of this murderous plot. While Lincoln is waving to whistle-stop well-wishers in the North, Pinkerton and his detectives operate undercover in proslavery Baltimore and join secret Confederate societies to learn more about the threat.

Number 2 on the Bestseller List is Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Achorn. It came out during the first week of the pandemic and was likely missed by a lot of readers who consume everything about Lincoln. I have not read this book either, but it has gotten good reviews. Here is an excerpt from Adam Goodheart’s review in the Washington Post:

In “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln,” Edward Achorn gives relatively little space to examining the speech itself, a mere 14 pages out of nearly 300 pages of text. Readers expecting an extended close reading of the oration, similar to Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “Lincoln at Gettysburg” (1992), will not find it here.

Instead, what Achorn gives us is a lively guided tour of Washington during the 24 hours or so around Lincoln’s swearing-in. We not only slosh through the mud on Pennsylvania Avenue but also slip among the gaslit parlors of Cabinet members’ mansions, ride the streetcar with Walt Whitman and join the expectant crowd at the East Front of the Capitol.

Achorn, a longtime writer and editor at the Providence Journal, has a journalist’s gift for finding just the right quotation. He deftly fishes memorable descriptions — often less-than-flattering ones — out of 19th-century newspapers and diaries, especially as he introduces the most distinguished residents of the nation’s capital.

The first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln: “a sallow, fleshy, uninteresting woman in white laces, & wearing a band of white flowers about her forehead, like some overgrown Ophelia.” (So said an Illinois newspaper.) She used to “cook Old Abe’s dinner and milk the cows,” but now swanned about the White House in low-cut gowns designed “to exhibit her milking apparatus to public gaze.” (So commented an Oregon senator.)

Number 3 is The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson. I reviewed this new book back in April and enjoyed it. The book is mostly focused on the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico and the Union war against nomadic Indigenous nations in the Southwest. Nelson used to teach history at Harvard and her writing ability is as good as her high-quality scholarship.

The LA Review of Books says:

Megan Kate Nelson has made an invaluable contribution to broadening our understanding of the Civil War in her riveting new book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. She has looked far to the West to explore the undertold story of the war in the deserts and mountains of the New Mexico territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico). The evocative title of her book comes from a soldier’s observation that what was playing out in New Mexico was, in fact, a “three-cornered war” between Union, Confederacy, and Native peoples.

Number 4 is Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America by Fergus M. Bordewich. I also reviewed this book. Bordewich focuses on Congressmen Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio and Senators William Pitt Fessenden of Maine and Benjamin Wade of Ohio to examine Congresses role in pushing the country towards Emancipation and Black citizenship. I really liked this book.

David Reynolds, writing in the Wall Street Journal says: “In no area was the Republican Congress more active than in dealing with slavery. Mr. Bordewich skillfully describes the continuing congressional effort to abolish the institution… He registers the drum beat of emancipation.””

It Wasn’t About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel Mitchum is Number 5 (and Number 1 of the Crazytown Bestsellers). As the title indicates, this book denies that slavery was the central cause of the war. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with the basic documents of the Confederacy, like the Declarations of Causes issued by the seceding states, knows that Southern whites started the war in order to preserve slavery and expand its reach into the West. Here are the first two lines from the Georgia Secession Declaration: “The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”

I have not read this book, but I have seen summaries of the book by the author and its argument is pretty much summed up in its title. While the first four books on the Bestseller List are all good histories, I am afraid that this book will only appeal to Lost Cause partisans and White Nationalists, the audience of choice for its publisher Regnery Press.

Number 6 is Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard. David Blight reviewed the book in the Washington Post, writing:

All nations have origin stories and, over time, national narratives and myths, however contested. When, how and by whose pens and voices over the course of the 19th century did the United States attain its dominant story? What indeed was the United States from its inception, traversing the cataclysm of the Civil War and Reconstruction, down to the era of World War I? A “federation” of sovereign states? A “nation-state in waiting” under God’s “providential” design? An “ethno-nation,” rooted in the fundamental belief in white supremacy? Or a “liberal republic” based on the creeds of natural rights, pluralism, popular sovereignty? These questions drive “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood,” an unusual but engaging collective biography by Colin Woodard, a distinguished journalist and author of books on American character and regionalism.

Woodard succeeds in demonstrating the high stakes of master narratives, versions of the past that people choose as identities and stories in which they wish to live. National histories take countries to war, build and destroy empires, enslave and liberate people. This book will help readers grasp the staying power and the consequences of the idea — ingrained in generations — that American history is essentially a chronicle of progress, a saga of liberty unfolding under some illusive pattern of exceptionalism and divine design. This story has, of course, smashed full-on into several racial, political and economic reckonings that defy its very meaning. Indeed, we are now in the midst of one of those reckonings fundamentally challenging how we tell our national story.

So, less a book on the Civil War, and more one on the concepts of national identity that were so tied up in that conflict.

Next is The Problem With Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo. The author is held in low repute by historians, yet his books against Lincoln are heavily promoted by far-right outfits with ties to, wait for it, the modern Republican Party. Here is what the Claremont Review says about this book:

The Real Lincoln is the latest attempt to finish the job so ignobly begun by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865. Although Lincoln breathed no more after that, his character and reputation lived on, to be sniped at ever since. The Lincoln haters are an increasingly diverse lot, with strange and not always compatible purposes. The alleged purpose of Thomas DiLorenzo’s invective is to defend constitutionalism and free market economics. He claims to demonstrate that Lincoln was an enemy of both, as well as a hypocrite on the subject of “racial equality.” What he mainly demonstrates, however, is that his aim is not nearly as good as Booth’s.

As the title suggests, The Real Lincoln purports to go beyond the mountains of revisionist historiography to reveal Lincoln’s genuine principles and purposes. According to DiLorenzo, these had nothing to do with the perpetuation of free government and the problem of slavery: The “real” Lincoln did not care a whit about the “peculiar institution.” At the core of the “real” Lincoln’s ambition was an unqualified and unwavering commitment to mercantilism, or socialism as DiLorenzo sometimes intimates. Lincoln would stop at nothing to impose the “Whig economic system” upon America, and any opinion he voiced regarding slavery was merely instrumental in advancing this end. Lincoln’s “cause,” in the words of DiLorenzo, was “centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” According to DiLorenzo, Lincoln said this “over and over again,” although DiLorenzo does not trouble himself to produce a shred of evidence for this assertion.

 If the “real” Lincoln needed to resort to war to advance his cause, he was happy to do it: “Lincoln decided that he had to wage war on the South,” because only military might would destroy “the constitutional logjam behind which the old Whig economic policy agenda had languished.” In the end, writes DiLorenzo, “[Lincoln] wanted war” and “was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way.” Lincoln was devoted to undermining the Constitution in the name of tariffs and internal improvement schemes. In its place Lincoln hoped to build a centralized mercantilist-socialist state, with himself at the helm.

Of course Lincoln and his Republican party supported tariffs, as had many Federalists, Democrats, and Whigs before them. They understood, as DiLorenzo does not, that all economics is political economics, and that in a world dominated by monarchs it made sense to encourage the expansion of American manufacturing power through tariffs. According to DiLorenzo’s libertarian-public choice analysis, Alexander Hamilton and his Whig followers — Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Lincoln above all — were arch-villain “statists” for supporting tariffs, while Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John C. Calhoun were defenders of “free trade.” DiLorenzo seems not to know that the first protective tariff in American history (1816) was introduced by Calhoun and supported by Madison and Jefferson, and opposed by Webster. DiLorenzo is so blinded by his commitment to purely theoretical free trade that he is oblivious to the real growing division between pro-slavery and pro-freedom forces in America in the 1850s. He cannot see that tariffs were in the service of free trade because they were in the service of freedom: tariffs advantaged free labor and put the squeeze on slave-labor economies.

In fact, DiLorenzo’s “new look” shows us nothing new. From the time of Jefferson Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and Alexander Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, the anti-Lincoln columns have marched over and over the same tired ground. Edgar Lee Masters’s Lincoln the Man, which DiLorenzo quotes approvingly, was a breathless compilation of every slander ever made against Lincoln. But if DiLorenzo’s message is old hat, the incompetence of the messenger is surely unprecedented. The book is a compendium of misquotations, out-of-context quotations, and wrongly attributed quotations — one howler after another, yet none of it funny.

For example, DiLorenzo repeatedly asserts that Lincoln did not believe in human equality and shared the widely held prejudices of his time that blacks were inferior. Here is DiLorenzo:

Lincoln even mocked the Jeffersonian dictum enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. He admitted that it had become “a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation,” but added, “I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism” So, with the possible exception of Siamese Twins, the idea of equality, according to Lincoln, was a sheer absurdity. This is in stark contrast to the seductive words of the Gettysburg Address, eleven years later, in which he purported to rededicate the nation to the notion that all men are created equal.

DiLorenzo cites the first joint debate between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, held in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1858, as the source of the quotation. The language actually comes from Lincoln’s eulogy of his longtime friend and colleague Henry Clay, delivered in July 1852. But that is the least of DiLorenzo’s problems. He uses this quotation, and a few other excerpted phrases, to “prove” that Lincoln’s professed belief in human equality was disingenuous. Here are Lincoln’s actual words:

[There are] a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man’s charter of freedom, the declaration “that all men are created equal.” So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. But, only last year, I saw with astonishment, what purported to be a letter of a very distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following, to me, very extraordinary language:

 I am fully aware that there is a text in some Bibles that is not in mine. Professional abolitionists have made more use of it, than of any passage in the Bible. It came, however, as I trace it, from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson, and since almost universally regarded as canonical authority ‘All men are born equal and free.’

 This is a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation. I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism.

 This sounds strangely in republican America. The like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic.

DiLorenzo thus attributes to Lincoln the words of a Virginia clergyman whom Lincoln quoted and then went on to criticize. In the course of his eulogy of Clay, Lincoln defended the proposition of human equality and equal natural rights, as he did in all his major addresses. His argument is precisely the opposite of what DiLorenzo claims it to be.

The review concludes with a punch in the face. According to the reviewer, Lorenzo’s “unreal Lincoln inhabits an unreal world, so crudely and tendentiously drawn as to beggar belief. One wonders if the libertarian neo-Confederates have run out of front-line troops. In this screed, at any rate, they have sent a giddy, careless, half-educated boy to do a man’s job. And it shows.”

Number 8 is The Cornfield: Antietam’s Bloody Turning Point by David Welker. Emerging Civil War had this to say about the new book:

Overall, David Welker’s The Cornfield creates a thoughtful microhistory of the action for Antietam’s Miller Cornfield. Students of the battle will want to pick up a copy for Welker’s analysis alone. This book demonstrates the intense complexity of one of the bloodiest pieces of ground soldiers fought for during the Civil War.

Number 9 is What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination by Robert Hutchinson. Although this book has received no reviews from reputable sources that I could find, it is still a “Civil War Bestseller.” Why? Most likely because it comes from Regnery Press. Regnery specializes in books for the fringe Right Wing from authors like “Diamond and Silk,” as well as hate screeds by the likes of Michelle Malkin, the “Godmother of the Alt-Right.” It Wasn’t About Slavery and Thomas DiLorenzo’s anti-Lincoln diatribe are also from this disreputable purveyor of bad history. Regnery uses its channels through the Alt-Right to market its products to those looking for confirmation of their worldview. Whether this book on the assassination follows that pattern, I do not know. If anyone has read it and thinks it is worthwhile, post a comment. The author has written a couple of books for more reputable publishers and so perhaps this is better than Regnery.

The final book in the Top 10 is LeeAnna Keith’s When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War. The book was favorably reviewed by Eric Foner in The Nation:

LeeAnna Keith’s new book, When It Was Grand, also returns to the mid–19th century, this time to consider the history of Radical Republicanism. In doing so, it adds to our understanding of how a rising tide of violence in the 1850s served as a harbinger of the Civil War, a conflict that culminated in the most radical act in American history: the uncompensated abolition of slavery. The author of The Colfax Massacre, a highly praised study of the bloodiest act of carnage against African Americans during Reconstruction, Keith makes an important contribution by placing Radicals at the center of these transformative events….

In When It Was Grand, Keith offers a capacious, if not entirely coherent, definition of the Civil War–era Radicals. Despite the book’s title (an allusion to the Republicans’ longtime identification as the Grand Old Party), she does not confine her account to individuals working within the political system. Her subjects include not only Radical Republicans but also abolitionists, who refused to participate in politics under a Constitution they deemed irreparably proslavery; Transcendentalists, for whom the abolition of slavery was as much a path to intellectual self-realization as a form of political action; and black activists, who campaigned during the war for racial equality in post-slavery America.

Despite these weaknesses, Keith’s capacious definition of the Radicals enables her to center her story outside the Beltway, which yields significant benefits. Her book is more interested in action than in ideology, more concerned with battles in the streets over fugitive slaves than with election campaigns and congressional legislation. She includes Radical women in her account of how the nation was torn asunder. For example, she devotes considerable attention to Jessie Frémont, a daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and the wife of John C. Frémont, the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate. Jessie Frémont was the political equivalent of a gambler who makes the most of a weak hand.

There are a few good trends in this year’s bestseller. First, No Bill O’Reilly! Bill did not do a new “Killing” book this year! Hooray!

Second, while “battle books” often dominate the Civil War list, their year the military stuff did not overwhelm everything else.

Third, some scholarly writers turned out good popular books.

The one continuing bad trend is the ability of Regnery to sell books of no historical worth to the white nationalist reading public.

 

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