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Historical person
1809–1865
Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. A lawyer and former Illinois legislator and congressman, he rose to national prominence through his opposition to the expansion of slavery and became the first Republican candidate to win the presidency.
Lincoln’s presidency was dominated by the American Civil War. He worked to preserve the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and supported the constitutional abolition of slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment. Re-elected in 1864, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865, only days after the principal Confederate armies had begun to surrender.
In Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, from Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, the United States moves through secession, political paralysis and failed compromise. Lincoln has won the presidency but cannot exercise executive power until his inauguration, while outgoing president James Buchanan struggles to preserve federal authority. Captivating History’s The Civil War follows the major eastern and western campaigns, the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and their generals, and the transformation of the war through emancipation. Abraham Lincoln is treated fictionally in Ann Rinaldi’s An Acquaintance with Darkness, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flash for Freedom!, William R. Forstchen and Newt Gingrich’s Grant Comes East, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, and John Jakes’ On Secret Service.
Periods
Series
The Gettysburg Trilogy is an alternate-history Civil War sequence that begins by changing the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. A Confederate victory gives Robert E. Lee the initiative, opening a campaign against Washington while Abraham Lincoln turns to Ulysses S. Grant to rebuild the Union war effort.…
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The Morland Dynasty is a thirty-six-book family saga tracing the fictional Morlands of Yorkshire from 1434 to the approach of the Second World War. Beginning with the marriage of Robert Morland and Eleanor, a ward of the Beaufort family, the sequence follows successive generations as Morland Place grows…
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Lucky Jack’s Civil War follows cavalry and raiding in the American Civil War from the Confederate side. The books use irregular operations, scouting, raids and the road to Gettysburg to show a mobile war of risk, divided loyalties and battlefield escalation.
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The Civil War trilogy uses fictional Confederate plots to place individual agents against decisive moments of the American conflict. Rebel Fever concerns an attempt to unleash disease in Washington during the winter of 1862, while Rebel Train follows cavalrymen who seize Abraham Lincoln’s train as he travels to…
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The Civil War Trilogy presents the eastern theatre of the American Civil War through three connected novels. Jeff Shaara’s Gods and Generals follows the principal commanders from the approach of secession to Chancellorsville; Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels reconstructs Gettysburg; and Jeff Shaara’s The Last Full…
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The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
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The Kent Family Chronicles trace successive generations of one family from the eve of the American Revolution to the early 1890s. The saga begins with Phillipe Charboneau, the unrecognised son of an English duke, who becomes Philip Kent in America, and follows his descendants as they build, lose…
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The North and South Trilogy follows the Mains of South Carolina and the Hazards of Pennsylvania, two families joined when Orry Main and George Hazard become friends at West Point. Their bond survives the Mexican–American War and years of sectional conflict, but slavery, secession and family pressure place…
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American Tapestries is a multi-author collection of standalone Christian historical romances, each using a different episode in United States history as the setting for a story of courage, identity and love. Nancy Moser’s contribution, The Journey of Josephine Cain, moves from Washington at the end of the Civil…
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Gore Vidal’s seven-volume Narratives of Empire sequence follows the United States from the revolutionary generation to the Cold War, combining the lives of the fictional Schuyler, Sanford and Day families with presidents, senators, journalists and political operators. The novels treat public history as a contest over power, reputation…
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The Grand and Batchelor mysteries pair Matthew Grand, a former Union cavalry officer, with English journalist James Batchelor as private enquiry agents in the years after the American Civil War. Their cases move between London and the United States, beginning in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
