For sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest struggle. The Kent State University Press is pleased to present this third volume in its multivolume series, reintroducing the most influential of more than 500 articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy, and tactics to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, and from the war’s causes to its aftermath and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published pioneering and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of the Middle Period.

In this third volume of the Civil War History Readers, John T. Hubbell has selected groundbreaking essays by Douglas L. Wilson, Mark Neely Jr., Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, Ludwell Johnson, Allen Guelzo, and other scholars who examine Lincoln’s assertive idealism, leadership, views on slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, and Lincoln as a war president. Hubbell’s introduction assesses the contribution of each article to our understanding of Lincoln and the Civil War era.