Von Drehle has done a masterful job of extracting riveting anecdotes from original sources and balancing them with recent contributions to the field. Blending good research with a gift for page-turning narrative, he adroitly weaves together the complex military, diplomatic, political, legal and moral saga of the 12 months of 1862. Though we know how the year will end…Von Drehle is talented enough to make the events unfold like a good thriller whose outcome hangs in the balance. Like Doris Kearns Goodwin (Tean of Rivals) and, more recently, Amanda Foreman (A World on Fire), he manages not only to describe but to reanimate these incidents and to make the reader feel not only a lucky observer of the inside story but a virtual participant in the drama…few authors have done a better job of juggling such a nourishing and delicious potpourri of Civil War history—keeping all the balls floating in the air while paying meticulous attention to every key aspect of Lincoln's brutally taxing, and perhaps even most momentous, year.
—Harold Holzer
Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year
Narrated by Robertson Dean
David Von DrehleUnabridged — 17 hours, 1 minutes
Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year
Narrated by Robertson Dean
David Von DrehleUnabridged — 17 hours, 1 minutes
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Overview
As 1862 dawned, the American republic was at death's door. The federal government appeared overwhelmed, the U.S. Treasury was broke, and the Union's top general was gravely ill. The Confederacy-with its booming economy, expert military leadership, and commanding position on the battlefield-had a clear view to victory. To a remarkable extent, the survival of the country depended on the judgment, cunning, and resilience of the unschooled frontier lawyer who had recently been elected president.
Twelve months later, the Civil War had become a cataclysm but the tide had turned. The Union generals who would win the war had at last emerged, and the Confederate army had suffered the key losses that would lead to its doom. The blueprint for modern America-an expanding colossus of industrial and financial might-had been indelibly inked. And the man who brought the nation through its darkest hour, Abraham Lincoln, had signed the Emancipation Proclamation and emerged as a singular leader.
In Rise to Greatness, acclaimed author David Von Drehle has created both a deeply human portrait of America's greatest president and a rich, dramatic narrative about our most fateful year.
Editorial Reviews
On New Year’s Day 1862, nine months after the firing on Fort Sumter, few thought President Lincoln had matters under control. Von Drehle (Triangle: The Fire That Changed America), a Time magazine editor-at-large, points out that the Confederate Army was camped near Washington, D.C. The growing Union Army, under charismatic but unwarlike General McClellan, was refusing to march. The future looked brighter in February when General Grant captured forts Henry and Donelson out west and in April when Union forces captured New Orleans. It looked even better when McClellan advanced near Yorktown, Va., but he dawdled and retreated in the face of energetic attacks. After Confederate forces moved north in September, McClellan’s deliberation produced a draw at bloody Antietam. Fed up, Lincoln dismissed McClellan. His replacement, Ambrose Burnside, led the army to disaster at Fredericksburg, so 1862 ended badly, but Lincoln had learned painful lessons, and 1863 produced victories for the North. This is a conventional popular history with familiar figures, events, anecdotes, and no revisionist opinions, but Von Drehle has chosen a critical year (“the most eventful year in American history” and the year Lincoln “rose to greatness”), done his homework, and written a spirited account. 8 pages of b&w photos, b&w illus., maps. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Dec.)
Outstanding...Lean, insightful, and often lyrical.” —USA Today
“These pages crackle with life and energy.” —James McPherson, The New York Review of Books
“Spellbinding...Von Drehle has done a masterful job....He adroitly weaves together the complex military, diplomatic, political, legal, and moral saga of the twelve months of 1862.” —Harold Holzer, The Washington Post
“An invigorating, inspiring, and often heartrending portrait of a great man and a troubled country...Von Drehle's deeply researched book provides a degree of detail that Hollywood can't touch.” —The Kansas City Star
“Von Drehle's polished style and sense of drama will appeal to general readers interested in this formative time in American history… Von Drehle makes a strong case that Lincoln's remarkable development both as a military strategist and as a political genius occurred during [1862], laying the groundwork for eventual Union triumph.” —Library Journal
“Von Drehle has chosen a critical year (‘the most eventful year in American history' and the year Lincoln rose to greatness), done his homework, and written a spirited account.” —Publishers Weekly
“With his keen journalist's eye for detail, and the surefooted feel of an historian, David Von Drehle has produced an enthralling book. Rise to Greatness is a marvelous and important story, marvelously told.” —Jay Winik, author of April 1865
“Von Drehle has chosen a critical year (‘the most eventful year in American history' and the year Lincoln rose to greatness), done his homework, and written a spirited account.” —Publishers Weekly
“Rise to Greatness is a terrific read packed with fascinating facts that add color to a powerful depiction of the Civil War's second year. The narrative is driven by Lincoln's movement toward freedom for the slaves and his growing disenchantment with General McClellan, climaxed by the general's removal from command and the president's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.” —James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
“In the perilous year leading up to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln had to maneuver against his own generals and cabinet officers while fending off dark forces desiring disunion or dictatorship. By succeeding, as David von Drehle shows in this fascinating narrative, Lincoln saved the Union and redefined the American presidency. This is not only an important work of history but also a valuable manual on leadership.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein and Steve Jobs
“Rise to Greatness is a fascinating and fast-paced account of Lincoln's pivotal year. David Von Drehle brilliantly captures the epic events and outsized personalities that accompanied the birth of the Emancipation Proclamation. His book succeeds in making a well-known story feel absolutely compelling.” —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana
“In this vivid, writerly, well-researched account, David Von Drehle demonstrates, month by month, that 1862 made Lincoln's presidency. In the haze of Civil War nostalgia, we can easily lose sight of the reality that the odds were terrible that a United States in any form would survive that harrowing year. Yet as Rise to Greatness shows, the events of 1862 gave birth to a different nation, one rooted in emancipation.” —David W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
“With his great gift for stirring portraiture and historical narrative, David von Drehle takes us into the world of the Civil War and 1862 so convincingly that you almost wonder how it will all turn out.” —Michael Beschloss, author of Presidential Courage
With his great gift for stirring portraiture and historical narrative, David von Drehle takes us into the world of the Civil War and 1862 so convincingly that you almost wonder how it will all turn out.
In this vivid, writerly, well-researched account, David Von Drehle demonstrates, month by month, that 1862 made Lincoln's presidency. In the haze of Civil War nostalgia, we can easily lose sight of the reality that the odds were terrible that a United States in any form would survive that harrowing year. Yet as Rise to Greatness shows, the events of 1862 gave birth to a different nation, one rooted in emancipation.
Rise to Greatness is a fascinating and fast-paced account of Lincoln's pivotal year. David Von Drehle brilliantly captures the epic events and outsized personalities that accompanied the birth of the Emancipation Proclamation. His book succeeds in making a well-known story feel absolutely compelling.
In the perilous year leading up to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln had to maneuver against his own generals and cabinet officers while fending off dark forces desiring disunion or dictatorship. By succeeding, as David von Drehle shows in this fascinating narrative, Lincoln saved the Union and redefined the American presidency. This is not only an important work of history but also a valuable manual on leadership.
With his keen journalist's eye for detail, and the surefooted feel of an historian, David Von Drehle has produced an enthralling book. Rise to Greatness is a marvelous and important story, marvelously told.
Brilliant.
In Rise to Greatness, acclaimed author David Von Drehle has created a deeply human portrait of arguably America's greatest president fueled by a rich, dramatic narrative focusing on our most fateful year.
A marvelous and gripping story, compellingly and beautifully written.
Appealingly written and artistically constructed…Von Drehle, a first-rank narrator, writes better than most historians… Von Drehle's largest contribution lies in his illuminating discussions of Lincoln as a superb leader.
More has been written and discussed about Abraham Lincoln than about any other U.S. president, and for good reason… The Von Drehle book and the Spielberg film effectively serve as bookends to the story of how Lincoln's personality allowed him to navigate and shape the beginning of the war and the end of it.
Riveting … Equal parts war story, political intrigue and character study, the book at times reads as much like a John Grisham page-turner as serious history… For those with an invigorated taste to learn more about Lincoln -- the real man, not the icon -- The Rise of Greatness is a must read.
An invigorating, inspiring and often heartrending portrait of a great man and a troubled country…Von Drehle's deeply researched book provides a degree of detail that Hollywood can't touch.
Outstanding… Lean, insightful and often lyrical.
1862 was the year of Lincoln's 'Rise to Greatness'… Von Drehle recounts the dramatic military and political events of that year, interspersing them with human-interest stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times… These pages crackle with life and energy.
Von Drehle (editor-at-large, TIME) tells the stories of Abraham Lincoln's personal and public lives month by month during 1862. The personal side includes the death of Lincoln's son Willie, Lincoln's difficult marriage, and his personal and political friendships. The public side of the story focuses on Lincoln's development as a military leader, the formation of the Emancipation Proclamation, and his relations with his cabinet. While traditionally the monumental events of 1863 are seen as the turning point in the Civil War, Von Drehle makes a strong case that Lincoln's remarkable development both as a military strategist and as a political genius occurred during these 12 months, laying the groundwork for eventual Union triumph. The author's assessment of Lincoln is primarily positive, although he addresses controversial issues such as Lincoln's complex views on race and speculation about Lincoln's sexual orientation, though he does not really investigate that topic himself, and it may come across as irresponsibly handled on the author's part. VERDICT Von Drehle's polished style and sense of drama will appeal to general readers interested in this formative time in American history.—MF
A historian zeroes in on the year Lincoln found his footing as president and set the country on a bold new course. "Never has there been a moment in history," said one U.S. senator, "when so much was all compressed into a little time." Von Drehle (Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, 2003, etc.) charts the tumultuous year, month by month, to demonstrate how the momentous events of 1862 unfolded. Amid the turmoil of Civil War, the largely Republican Congress passed legislation with far-reaching postwar consequences: funding a transcontinental railroad and land-grant colleges, strengthening the Army and Navy, establishing a Bureau of Agriculture, adopting new fiscal and monetary policies, outlawing slavery in the District of Columbia, instituting a draft and authorizing the enlistment of blacks in the military. For all these enterprises to flourish, though, the war still had to be won. With rumors of domestic conspiracies and coups swirling and with the allegiance of border states still tenuous, the Civil War turned savage and hard with unprecedented slaughters at places like Shiloh, Antietam and Fredericksburg. At the center of the storm, Von Drehle deftly places Lincoln, gradually mastering the art of war, ultimately firing the too-timid McClellan, solemnly accepting and desperately searching for a general to apply the cruel arithmetic necessary for Union victory. In 1862, Lincoln suffered the loss of a son and the near loss of another, and he watched his grieving wife become unmoored. All the while, the president maneuvered around Taney's Supreme Court, quelled an insurrection in the Republican caucus, mediated the squabbling in his Cabinet, held off the Democrats in the midterm elections, and prepared the ground for the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years of bitter fighting remained, but Confederate armies would never again be as formidable. Meanwhile, under Lincoln's steady hand, the Union put in place the political and military machinery that would win the war and assure a future few imagined before Fort Sumter. A thoroughly engaging examination of the irreversible changes emerging from a year when the nation's very survival remained in doubt.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169553659 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
“So Much Was All Compressed”
The year began with a day so warm and fine that only the calendar said January. There would be few pleasant moments in 1862, but New Year’s Day in Washington, D.C., was one of them. Everyone was out enjoying the sunshine that morning—women in demure bonnets, men wishing they had left their overcoats at home, children dodging and shouting. The dusty streets of the half-built city were filled with people making their way toward the White House, where, by tradition, the president threw open the doors on the first day of each year.
Never had there been so large a crowd. The capital had doubled in size in the previous six months and was rapidly doubling again, as young men by the tens of thousands poured into Washington to join the Army of the Potomac. In April 1861, when war broke out between North and South, the entire U.S. Army numbered about 16,000 men, spread in little garrisons across the continent. By November, nearly five times that number, some 75,000 troops, could be mustered in a single field outside Washington for a presidential review. The ranking U.S. general planned to lead a column of more than a quarter of a million troops against the rebellious South.
Everywhere one looked in the capital, there were soldiers and more soldiers, brimming with zeal, eager for action, ignorant of war. They filled camps covering miles of hillsides in all directions. By day, the untested warriors marched and drilled, or cut logs and dug trenches to ring the capital with forts and firing pits. By night, some crowded into slapdash saloons and boardinghouse brothels. This instant army, like a great magnet, attracted regiments of merchants, job seekers, journalists, do-gooders, adventurers, spies, thieves, and would-be war contractors. A dull, swampy city was transformed in weeks into an overcrowded hive of patriotism, opportunism, and paranoia.
On the new year’s first morning, multitudes packed themselves into the blocks around the Executive Mansion, flowing down wooden sidewalks and dirt streets onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington’s only paved thoroughfare. There, the clip-clop of horseshoes and clanking of swords signaled the passage of freshly minted officers in full regalia: gold braid, white gloves, yellow sashes, obsidian boots. Carriage wheels rattled and friends called greetings, while somewhere in the distance, a Marine band blared martial music. Directly north of the White House, in the grand town houses around Lafayette Square, servants hurried to finish polishing the silver and laying out refreshments, for it was also tradition that the owners of these houses—cabinet members and sea captains and confidants of presidents past and present—would open their own doors.
The New Year’s Day open house was a ritual of democracy in the spirit of Andrew Jackson, whose statue, atop a rearing horse, adorned the center of Lafayette Square. On this one day, everyone was welcome in the halls of power, from statesmen to workingmen, from consuls to clerks, from the Roman-nosed senator Orville Hickman Browning to the scoundrel who picked Browning’s pocket. It was “the greatest jam ever witnessed on any similar occasion,” one newspaper correspondent observed. The people of Washington, it seemed, had somehow agreed for a few hours to forget their desperate situation and celebrate a new beginning.
Absent the holiday exuberance, however, a cool assessment of the country’s present circumstances would show that the American republic was in grave danger. The hope that secession fever would burn itself out was being trampled in the rush to battle stations. Strategies for reviving pro-Union sentiments in the South were stymied by the sheer size of the breakaway Confederate States of America, which covered an expanse larger than the entire European territory conquered by Napoleon. A pocket of loyalists in western Virginia had been liberated the previous summer by Union troops marching eastward from Ohio, but the pro-Union population of the more remote Appalachian Mountains, in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, was scarcely reachable down long dirt roads through hostile territory. Elsewhere in Dixie, what Union sentiment survived was scattered and cowed. The Confederacy was in the process of mobilizing a greater percentage of its population as soldiers than any European power had ever achieved. Those troops were led by some of the most experienced military men on the North American continent, starting with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate, combat veteran, and former U.S. secretary of war.
The Confederacy also wielded a powerful economic weapon: near total control of the global cotton supply, at a time when textiles were driving the industrial revolution and cotton was perhaps the world’s most important commodity. The cotton embargo enforced by rebel leaders was a gun to the heads of the British and French governments, putting tremendous pressure on them to support Southern independence. Pressure aside, the idea that the Confederacy—now a powerful country in its own right—could be tamed and forced back into the Union by an army of raw volunteers, led by an unschooled frontier lawyer as commander in chief, struck most European observers as far-fetched, even preposterous. “It is in the highest Degree likely that the North will not be able to subdue the South,” the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, counseled his Foreign Office.
Such skepticism was reinforced by conditions on the ground. Rebel soldiers menaced Washington from nearby Manassas, Virginia, where they had routed a Union army a few months earlier. Jefferson Davis was weighing a campaign into Maryland to stir up secessionists and cut off the capital from the North. Confederate artillery commanded the Potomac River above and below the capital, effectively sealing the waterway. No one in civilian authority had any detailed knowledge of the plans being prepared by the Union’s top general, George B. McClellan; worse, McClellan was ill and rumored to be dying.
The federal government, meanwhile, appeared overwhelmed. The president was increasingly seen as feckless and inadequate. Congress was in the hands of a political party that had never governed before. The Treasury Department was broke, yet federal spending was multiplying as never before; in 1862, the government would spend six times as much as in 1861. (Northern banks, fearing a panic by demoralized investors, had closed their exchange windows, refusing to redeem paper money with gold or silver.) The War Department was a corrupt shambles, its chief on the verge of being fired. Despairing State Department envoys to Britain and France believed that the great powers were aligned against their besieged government; it appeared to be only a matter of time before Europe would intervene to settle the conflict in favor of the Confederacy. A rebel diplomat crowed from London, “At present there is a probability that our recognition by her Britannic Majesty’s Government will not be much longer delayed.” President Davis considered European intervention almost inevitable, and he shaped his strategies around that confidence.
To the east of the White House, at the far end of that lone paved avenue, stood the unfinished U.S. Capitol, darkly crowned by the cast-iron skeleton of an enormous dome. To the south of the mansion, across a fetid bog, rose the sad stump of the Washington Monument, abandoned for lack of funds. These uncompleted projects were silent reminders that great things had been planned in this city, and large dreams dreamt. The boldest of all the American dreams was the vision of a great new nation that would span the continent, dominate the hemisphere, and rival any country on earth. This dream of one nation indivisible, from sea to shining sea, was the true prize at stake in the terrible months ahead.
Americans in 1862 understood what later generations have largely forgotten: if secession managed a first success, there would be no logical end to it. Why would two nations, North and South, neatly divide the space and resources they once had shared? New and more complex fault lines would surely open. Already, respectable New Yorkers could be heard suggesting that their city ought to declare itself an independent free port, like Hamburg in Europe. The bonds holding New England to the old Northwest—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin—were weak and fraying. And if the Union shattered east of the Mississippi, there would be little to connect any of the pieces to the treasure lands of the West. A strong current of independence still ran through the old Republic of Texas; how could anyone be confident that the Lone Star State would remain bound to the Confederacy? In Missouri, the celebrated explorer and politician John C. Frémont was said to be scheming to create an independent nation on the western banks of the Big Muddy. Beside the Pacific, Californians were talking about striking out on their own—after all, less than a dozen years of statehood tied them to the faraway Union.
Secession, then, was a tiger that might bite in many directions. As Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a leading Southern Unionist, asked, “If there is one division of the states, will there not be more than one?” Wouldn’t North America soon be as fragmented and war-prone as Europe, “thirty-three petty governments with a little prince in one, a potentate in another, a little aristocracy in a third, a little democracy in a fourth, and a republic somewhere else; a citizen not being able to pass from one State to another without a passport . . . with quarrelling and warring among the little petty powers, which would result in anarchy?” Johnson argued persuasively that dissolution of the Union would “only be the beginning of endless war.”
Nor was territory the only thing at stake. Secession, if allowed to stand, would deliver a fatal blow to the ideal of constitutional government in a diverse nation. If the U.S. Constitution could be dissolved by a dissatisfied minority, then it was unsustainable for the long run. Such a system could solve only easy problems and survive only mild disagreements. If secession prevailed, the Constitution of Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and Washington would fail the test of great governments, which is the ability to endure, even flourish, through crisis. As the president had recently put it in his annual message to Congress, “The insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.” (Two years later, at Gettysburg, he would put the case more memorably.) Southerners maintained that they were fighting for their own rights, especially the right to their lawful property, namely slaves; and to travel with that property through Northern states; and to live without fear that abolitionists would encourage runaways or incite slave uprisings. But many in the North believed that the integrity of the nation came first, for no rights of any kind could be guaranteed by a powerless government. Union, in fact, was the cornerstone of the Constitution, and it said so with the opening words of the Preamble: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .”
In the speeches and posters and banners and newspapers that rallied the soldiers to Washington, the words “Union” and “Freedom” were virtually inseparable. But when the cards of history were still facedown, to believe that the United States would ultimately survive this crisis required a leap of faith, and as the second year of secession began, that leap was increasingly difficult to make. From the days of the Romans to revolutionary France, no republic had ever survived such a calamity. Both experience and history suggested that—with so much at risk and such strong enemies—only a dictatorship could reunite the country.
In the smoke-choked barrooms of Washington’s finest hotels, at the dinner tables of senior Union officers, in the drawing rooms of Washington’s leading politicians, the possibility that a military dictator might soon replace the president was endlessly discussed. McClellan, the Union commander, had toyed with the idea that he might become exactly that sort of savior: “I almost think were I to win some small success now, I could become Dictator,” he wrote to his wife, and he did nothing to discourage the press from assigning him the nickname “the Young Napoleon.” He even posed for official photographs with his hand tucked into his tunic.
Other murmurings around Washington conjured John Frémont delivering the coup d’état. Frémont’s wife, the formidable daughter of Missouri’s legendary senator Thomas Hart Benton, had threatened something along those lines during an angry meeting with the president. Even Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, found himself pining for a despot. The man in the White House could wield virtually unlimited power in this crisis, Sumner wrote to a friend, “but how vain to have the power of a God, if not to use it God-like.” Whatever face it wore, dictatorship seemed at least as plausible to reasonable people as the notion that a constitutional republic of elected leaders could somehow survive a trial as profound as the Civil War.
As thousands of people made their way to the White House on the first day of 1862, the city swirled with talk of conspiracies and coups, swinging wildly from military mania to existential dread and back again. With the nation sundered by war, the stakes were as plain as the morning’s blue sky: the American experiment was on the brink of failure, a half-finished dream at risk of becoming as forlorn as the abandoned obelisk, as unrealized as the Capitol dome.
That balmy January day began what would prove the most eventful year in American history, and perhaps the most misunderstood. It was the year in which the Civil War became a cataclysm, the federal government became a colossus, and the Confederacy came nearest to winning its independence, yet suffered the key losses that led to its doom. Eighteen sixty-two sounded the death knell of slavery, and it forged the military leaders who would eventually win the war, men like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Farragut. In indelible ink, it fashioned the astounding blueprint of modern America, an America of continental breadth, rapid communication, networked transportation, widespread education, industrial might, and high finance. At the same time, it revealed the dear cost of entry into that future, payable in blood and misery, on battlefields from Shiloh to Sharpsburg, Pea Ridge to Fredericksburg. Most of all, though, 1862 was the year the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, rose to greatness.
As the year approached, one U.S. senator presciently observed: “Never has there been a moment in history when so much was all compressed into a little time.” And never since the founding of the country had so much depended on the judgment, the cunning, the timing, and the sheer endurance of one man.
Copyright © 2012 by David Von Drehle
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