Difficult to read but impossible to ignore are Jefferson Davis’s memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and Varina’s more pleasing Jefferson Davis…A Memoir, by His Wife.
The ultimate Lincoln book is Michael Burlingame’s recent, all-comprehensive, and magisterial two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life. No future book on the Civil War president can be written without it, and from no other work can a general reader learn so much about Abraham Lincoln. The other vital book of the modern era is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The essential library on the assassination, death, and funeral of Abraham Lincoln includes Ralph Borreson, When Lincoln Died; William T. Coggeshall, The Journeys of Abraham Lincoln…From Washington to Springfield; Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Twenty Days; Lloyd Lewis, Myths After Lincoln; B. F. Morris, Memorial Record of the Nation’s Tribute to Abraham Lincoln; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; Victor Searcher, The Farewell to Lincoln; Edward Steers Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia; James L. Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer; Scott D. Trostel, The Lincoln Funeral Train; and Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Abott, A. Abott, The Assassination and Death of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, at Washington, on the 14th of April, 1865 (New York: American News Company, 1865).
Abraham Lincoln: An Exhibition at the Library of Congress in Honor of the 150th Anniversary of His Birth (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1959).
Allardine, Bruce S., More Generals in Gray: A Companion Volume to “Generals in Gray.” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
Allen, Felicity, Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
Arnold, Isaac N., Sketch of the Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: John B. Bachelder, 1869).
Baker, Jean H., Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
Ballard, Michael B., A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).
Bancroft, A. C., The Life and Death of Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Southern Confederacy: Together with Comments of the Press and Funeral Sermons (New York: J.S. Ogilvie, 1889).
Bartlett, John Russell, The Literature of the Rebellion: A Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets Relating to the Civil War in the United States (Boston: Draper and Halliday, 1866).
Basler, Roy P., The Lincoln Legend: A Study in Changing Conceptions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).
______, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols., plus index and supplements (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953).
Bates, David Homer, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (New York: Century Co., 1907).
Bates, Finis L., Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (Memphis, TN: Finis L. Bates, 1907).
Beale, Howard K., ed., The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859-1866, vol. 4 of the Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1933).
______. Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).
Bell, John, Confederate Sea Seadog: John Taylor Wood in Exile (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002).
Benham, William Burton, Life of Osborn H. Oldroyd: Founder and Collector of Lincoln Mementos (Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1927).
Berkin, Carol, Civil War Wives: The Lives & Times of Angelina Grimké Weld, Virginia Howell Davis & Julia Dent Grant (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
Bernstein, Iver, The New York City Draft Riots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Bingham, John Armor, Trial of the Conspirators for the Assassination of President Lincoln, s.c. Argument of John A. Bingham, Special Judge Advocate (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865).
Bishop, Jim, The Day Lincoln Was Shot (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955).
Blackett, R. J. M., Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Blair, William, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Blake, Mortimer, Human Depravity John Wilkes Booth: A Sermon Occasioned by the Assassination of President Lincoln, and Delivered in the Winslow Congregational Church, Taunton, Massachusetts on Sunday Evening, April 23, 1865, by the Pastor. (Champlain: privately printed at the Moorsfield Press, 1925).
Bleser, Carol K. and Lesley J. Gordon, eds., Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
______, eds., “The Marriage of Varina Howell and Jefferson Davis: A Portrait of the President and the First Lady of the Confederacy,” Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-31.
Blight, David W., Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001).
Blue, Frederick J., Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987).
Bohn, Casimir, Bohn’s Hand-Book of Washington (Washington, D.C.: Casimir Bohn, 1856).
Boritt, Gabor S., ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Borreson, Ralph, When Lincoln Died (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965).
Boyd, Andrew, Abraham Lincoln, Foully Assassinated April 14, 1865 (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell, 1868).
______. Boyd’s Washington and Georgetown Directory: 1864 (Washington, D.C.: Hudson Taylor, 1863).
______. A Memorial Lincoln Bibliography: Being an Account of Books, Eulogies, Sermons, Portraits, Engravings, Medals, etc., Published upon Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States, Assassinated Good Friday, April 14, 1865 (Albany, NY: Andrew Boyd, Directory Publisher, 1870).
Bradley, Mark L., This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennet Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Brenner, Walter C., The Ford Theatre Lincoln Assassination Playbills (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1937).
Brooks, Noah, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: Century Co., 1895).
Brooks, Stewart M., Our Murdered Presidents: The Medical Story (New York: Frederick Fell, Inc., 1966).
Brown, George William, Baltimore and the 19th of April, 1861 (Baltimore, MD: N. Murray, 1887).
Browning, Orville Hickman, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, edited with introduction and notes by Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925-33), two vols.
Brubaker, John H., The Last Capital: Danville, Virginia, and the Final Days of the Confederacy (Danville, VA: Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, 1979).
Bruce, George A., The Capture and Occupation of Richmond (n.p.: privately printed, 1927).
Bryan, George S., The Great American Myth: The True Story of Lincoln’s Murder (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1940).
Bryan, Vernanne, Laura Keene: A British Actress on the American Stage, 1826- 1873 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1997).
Buchanan, Lamont, A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951).
Buckingham, J. E. Reminiscences and Souvenirs of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Press of Rufus H. Darby, 1894).
Budiansky, Stephen, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox (New York: Viking, 2008).
Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Cable, Mary, The Avenue of the Presidents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
Cain, Marvin R., Lincoln’s Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965).
Campbell, W. P., The Escape and Wanderings of
J. Wilkes Booth Until Ending of the Trail by Suicide in Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, OK: privately printed, 1922).
Carpenter, Francis B., Six Months in the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866).
Carroll, Gordon, ed., The Desolate South 1865-1866: A Picture of the Battlefields and of the Devastated Confederacy by John T. Trowbridge (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956).
Cashin, Joan E., First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006.
Chamlee, Roy Z., Lincoln’s Assassins: A Complete Account of Their Capture, Trial, and Punishment (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990).
Chase, Salmon P., Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, ed. David Donald (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954).
Chesson, Michael B., Richmond After the War 1865-1890 (Richmond: Virginia State Liberty, 1981).
Clark, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln in the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: Press of W. F. Roberts Co., 1925).
Clark, James C., Last Train South: The Flight of the Confederate Government from Richmond (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1984).
Clarke, Asia Booth, The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938).
Clarke, Champ, The Assassination: Death of a President (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1987).
Coggeshall, William T., Lincoln Memorial: The Journeys of Abraham Lincoln: From Springfield to Washington, 1861, as President Elect; and from Washington to Springfield, 1865, as President Martyred (Columbus: Ohio State Journal, 1865).
Cole, Donald B., and John J. McDonough, eds., Benjamin Brown French: Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828-1870 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989).
Coleman, Winston J., Jr., Last Days, Death and Funeral of Henry Clay (Lexington, KY: Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, 1951).
Collins, Donald E., The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Connelly, Thomas L., The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
Cook, Robert J. Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
Cooling, Benjamin Franklin, Symbol, Sword and Shield: Defending Washington During the Civil War (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Company, 1991).
Cooper, William J., Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
______. Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
______, ed. Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2003).
Coski, John M., The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Coulter, E. Merton, The Confederate States of America 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950).
Craughwell, Thomas J., Stealing Lincoln’s Body (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).
Crist, Lynda Lasswell, et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 12 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971-2008).
Cullen, Jim, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
Dabney, Virginius, Richmond: The Story of a City (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), revised and expanded edition of original 1976 edition.
Dana, Charles A., Recollections of the Civil War: With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties (New York: D. Appleton, 1889).
Davis, Burke, The Long Surrender (New York: Random House, 1985).
Davis, Jefferson, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881).
Davis, Varina Howell, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States, a Memoir, by His Wife, 2 vols. (New York: Belford Co., 1890).
Davis, William C., An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
______. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
______. Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Free Press, 2002).
______. The Lost Cause: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
De Chambrun, Marquis Adolphe. Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War: A Foreigner’s Account. (New York: Random House, 1952).
Dewitt, David Miller, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
______. The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1903).
______. The Judicial Murder of Mary E. Surratt (Baltimore, MD: J. Murphy, 1895).
Dirck, Brian R., Lincoln & Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).
Dixon, Thomas, The Victim: A Romance of the Real Jefferson Davis (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1914).
Donald, David H., Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
______. Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Family Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Doster, William E., Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915).
Dowdey, Clifford, and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961).
Downes, Alan S., The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964).
Eaton, Clement, A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1954).
______. Jefferson Davis (New York: Free Press, 1977).
Eckert, Edward K., “Fiction Distorting Fact”: Prison Life, Annotated by Jefferson Davis (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987).
Edwards, William C., and Edward Steers Jr., The Lincoln Assassination: The Evidence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Eicher, David J., The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
Eisenschiml, Otto, The Case of A. L———, Aged 56 (Chicago: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1943).
______. In the Shadow of Lincoln’s Death (New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc., 1940).
______. Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937).
Emerson, Bettie A. C., Historic Southern Monuments: Representative Memorials of the Heroic Dead of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1911).
Epperson, James F., ed., The Positive Identification of the Body of John Wilkes Booth, Civil War Naval Chronology (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971).
Epstein, Daniel Mark, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).
______. The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
Eskew, Garnett Laidlaw, Willard’s of Washington: The Epic of a Capital Caravansary (New York: Coward-McCann, 1954).
Evans, Eli N., Judah Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York: Free Press, 1988).
Evans, W. A., Mrs. Abraham Lincoln: A Study of Her Personality and Her Influence on Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932).
Fahs, Alice, and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Faust, Drew Gilpin, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
______. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
______. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
Fehrenbacher, Don E., and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Fellman, Michael, The Making of Robert E. Le
e (New York: Random House, 2000).
Ferguson, W. J., I Saw Booth Shoot Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930).
Field, Maunsell B., Memories of Many Men and of Some Women (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874).
Fleischner, Jennifer, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).
Flood, Charles Bracelen, Lee: The Last Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Flower, Frank A., Edwin McMasters Stanton (Akron, OH: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1905).
Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Fowler, Robert H., Album of the Lincoln Murder: Illustrating How It Was Planned, Committed and Avenged (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1965).
Freeman, Douglas Southall, The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939).
Frey, Herman S., Jefferson Davis (Nashville, TN: Frey Enterprises, 1977).
Furgurson, Ernest B., Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
______. Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004).
Furtwangler, Albert, Assassin on Stage: Brutus, Hamlet, and the Death of Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Gallagher, Gary W., Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
______. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
Gammans, Harold, Lincoln Names and Epithets (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1955).
Garner, Stanton, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).
Garrison, Webb, The Encyclopedia of Civil War Usage (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2001).