This multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history. Historian Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius, as the one-term congressman rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president. When Lincoln emerged as the victor at the Republican National Convention, his rivals were dismayed. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically...

"A widow who runs a small boardinghouse on H Street, Mary Surratt isn't half as committed to the cause [of the Civil War] as her son, Johnny. If he's not delivering messages or escorting veiled spies, he's [inviting] home men like John Wilkes Booth, the actor who is even more charming in person than he is on the stage. But when President Lincoln is killed, the question of what Mary knew becomes more important than anything else. Was she a cold-blooded...

A timely and intimate look into Abraham Lincoln's White House through the lives of his two closest aides and confidants.

"Now, perhaps, only those enmeshed in 19th-century American history know his name; but when John Hay died in 1905, he was one of the most famous men in the world. And one of the most highly regarded. Abraham Lincoln's private secretary during the Civil War, thereafter as a popular poet, novelist, newspaper editor, highly esteemed historian and biographer, diplomat, businessman, and secretary of state until his death, Hay enjoyed remarkable success...

"Walter Stahr, author of the ... bestseller Seward, now tells the amazing story of Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, the most powerful and controversial of the men close to the president. Stanton raised an army of a million men and directed it from his Washington telegraph office, with Lincoln often at his side. He arrested and imprisoned thousands for "war crimes," some serious and some merely political. He was essential to the nation's...