Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln and Fort Sumter

It is not the least tragedy of a tragic life that Lincoln was obliged to face the most terrible decision of all, before he had grown to the full height of his Presidential stature. 

The Causes of the American Civil War

Taking a historiographical angle, Marcus Cunliffe describes how, in 1861, the American federal experiment broke down, and there ensued the greatest and most hard-fought of modern wars before that of 1914.