After the secession of eleven southern states, Jefferson Davis gave up his U.S. citizenship to accept the presidency of the Confederate States of America and led the South in the Civil War.

"As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the...

Series explores the dynamics, people and events that characterized the end of the Civil War era. This volume presents portraits of Civil War leaders Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time--the Yankees are coming, it warned. That night Davis fled Richmond, setting off an intense manhunt for the Confederate president. Two weeks later, President Lincoln was assassinated, and the nation was convinced that Davis was involved in the conspiracy that led to the crime. Lincoln's murder, autopsy, and White House funeral transfixed...

In this, the first dual biography of the two leaders, Bruce Chadwick argues that one of several reasons why the North won and the South lost can be found in the drastically different characters of the two presidents. The electric and flexible personality of Lincoln enabled him to build coalitions among warring political factions and become one of the strongest and most successful presidents in U.S. history. The inability of the uncompromising Davis...