Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age

“One of the most ambitious, ingenious, and sophisticated works of psychohistory yet to appear. . . .Forgie’s thesis challenges an entire tradition of American historiography.” —David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books George B. Forgie argues that the crisis of the Union was decisively structured by one obvious, overbearing fact: the dominant figures in American public life in the 1850s were born in the early Republic. They were raised to think of its founders as immortal fathers whom the...