Seward
Emancipation
One hundred and fifty years ago, on July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln discussed with his cabinet for the first time the possibility of an emancipation proclamation. Lincoln read out to his colleagues a draft declaring that the slaves in the states (if any) still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would become and remain free. …
Read MoreTop 10
Publishers Weekly has designated my Seward book as one of its “top ten” history and military history books for the fall season. In the short review on June 25, PW says that the book is a “fresh contribution to the Civil War-era bookshelf” which “brings out from Lincoln’s shadow the formidable William Seward, an antislavery…
Read MorePost Partum
I am in our northern Virginia home, sorting and packing books, and dipping into books from time to time, this morning. The introduction to the one-volume abridgement of Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume life of Robert E. Lee has a wonderful little story. After sending off the last pages of his manuscript to the publisher, Freeman…
Read MoreThird Pass
My friend Nick Trefethen, in his book Trefethen’s Index Cards, says that “before computers articles and books went through one or two or three drafts before publication. Authors had to be skilled at envisioning how copy would look in print that was splattered with corrections and reorderings and insertions. Nowadays, if the author is finicky,…
Read MoreIndex Anguish
A wise man, John Kaminski, once told me that the index is the most important part of the book. “The index is where most researchers will begin,” he said. “If they are looking for material on paper money, for example, and find no entry for paper money in your index, they will put your book…
Read MoreSeward and the States
I am working this morning on a summary of Seward’s relations with the various states, and realizing that there is almost no state which Seward did not visit. Not many northern politicians ever visited the South, but Seward lived in Georgia as a young man and visited Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and other southern states…
Read MoreWilliam Howard Russell
William Howard Russell was already a famous war correspondent when he arrived in the United States in March 1861, intent on covering the imminent American civil war. Russell traveled widely over the next year, leaving in April 1862, and then published in London in 1863 a book he entitled “My Diary North and South.” The…
Read MoreTarbell, Thomas and Burlingame
I am reading this morning a wonderful little book: “Lincoln’s Humor” and Other Essays, by Benjamin Thomas. It is a collection of essays by Thomas, one of the great Lincoln biographers, edited and published after his death by another great Lincoln biographer, Michael Burlingame. One of the essays deals with yet another Lincoln biographer: Ida…
Read MoreEarly 1837
Seward’s letters to his first and best friend, Thurlow Weed, are an invaluable source for his biographer. The letters survive, in the original, in the files at the University of Rochester. I reviewed hundreds of the Seward-Weed letters myself; many others were reviewed and “transcribed” by my great research assistant Kristi Martin; others were printed…
Read MoreWriter’s Quotation Book
One of the advantages of living in two places is that the pleasure of “coming home” to books in the “other place.” We were in our Virginia home for a few days this month, and I found a number of books that I had not seen or read in years. One of them, a particular…
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