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    After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace
    After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace
    After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace
    Audiobook13 hours

    After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace

    Written by A.J. Langguth

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver.

    By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by postwar greed and corruption during his two terms. Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by Charles Sumner, the Radical senator from Massachusetts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 16, 2014
    ISBN9781494574260
    Author

    A.J. Langguth

    A. J. Langguth (1933–2014) was the author of eight books of nonfiction and three novels. After Lincoln marks his fourth book in a series that began in 1988 with Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. He served as a Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times, after covering the Civil Rights movement for the newspaper. Langguth taught for three decades at the University of Southern California and retired in 2003 as emeritus professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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    Reviews for After Lincoln

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    • 5/5
      This should be required reading in all the high schools across the United States. It’s a well written snapshot of our history.
    • 2/5
      As other folks have noted, this is a disorganized book that doesn't really address its title: How the North won the war and lost the peace. There are small biographies as headings for most chapters, but that means the author continually goes back to the Civil War to explain what this or that character did in the war, and then explains what they did after the war. But with a focus on people instead of issues, there is no attempt to figure out what might have been done differently. Was corruption a problem and if so, how much was it real and how much overblown? If Lincoln had lived, what might he have done differently? If the large plantations had been broken up and the land distributed to poor blacks and whites, would that have prevented the Southern elite from returning to power? And what caused the intense racial hatred of poor whites for blacks that kept them from political alliances? Were too many Americans, North and South, so convinced that the former slaves were not and could never be equal that there was no possible fair solution? None of these issues gets discussed here. You'll be much better off with Eric Foner's Reconstruction, one of the most comprehensive efforts to examine one of the least successful periods in American politics and history.
    • 3/5
      I received an Advanced Reading Copy courtesy of Goodreads Giveaways.

      Langguth's latest work is one that seeks to tackle the narrative of political life and reform efforts upon the close of the Civil War. Though the book's chapter 'titles' are a bit misleading, Langguth's level of detail is impressive, and he includes discussion of the daily lives, thoughts, and actions of political and military figures from the Civil War through Reconstruction that would not normally be available to the casual reader. Langguth presents his overall take on the North's failure to rebuild and reform the South as one of political tragedy and individual opportunism, where rivalries and old resentments prevented any real progress towards bringing the South away from slavery and repression towards equality and development.

      An entertaining work of historical analysis that could have been subdivided a bit clearer. Solid in its ease of reading for casual history readers and good for students and professionals due to its level of detail.
    • 2/5
      Based on the title of this book readers could be forgiven for assuming that they would be getting an in-depth examination on the Reconstruction period of the south, its successes, failures and long term effects. Those readers will be mostly disappointed. Instead After Lincoln spends most of its time giving readers short biographies of the era’s figures. This includes the likes of Charles Sumner, William Seward, Jeff Davis, Andrew Johnson, Nathan Bedford Forest and Ulysses Grant. While interesting, these sections offer no more depth then what could be found on a Wikipedia page. The author does spend some time reviewing the effects of the KKK and the Jim Crow laws. But just as it seems the book will finally get on track it with its supposed main subject, it always veers off track again. The period of Reconstruction is not often studied and little understood by the general public. But it is an important period of this nation’s history and one that deserves to be widely understood. The failings of that era to address equality for all coupled with the monolithic southern resistance to basic civil rights are all issues that very much matter today. After Lincoln isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t do much at all to address the issues that were suggested in its title.
    • 4/5
      As dreadful as the Civil War had been from the loss of life, the aftermath (reconstruction) was worse because of the perverted application of the principles of liberty. The author has done a commendable job of sketching the whole period which has never really concluded. The meanness of the principle actors is best seen as some weird real-life Halloween. Even the better actors are none too good. Mr Langguth has done a commendable job in reducing the monsters of reconstruction to the printed page; a less accomplished author may have surrendered to characterizations. And still one is left with a huge disconnect -- where did so many go so wrong.