Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
The Art of Abraham Lincoln
By James M. McPherson
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
by Garry Wills
Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $23.00
One of the questions often encountered by a Civil War historian is, 'Why did the North fight?' Southern motives seem easier to understand. Southern states seceded because they perceived Lincoln's election in 1860 as a threat to their social order. Confederates fought to defend their independence, their institutions (mainly slavery), their way of life, from the annihilation they feared would result from defeat. But why did Yankees fight? Why did they persist through four years of the bloodiest conflict in American history, which cost 360,000 Northern lives and, as a proportion of national wealth, the equivalent today of $3 trillion? Puzzling over the same question in 1863, the Confederate War Department clerk John Jones wrote in his diary:
Review, 3414 words
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