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...

In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period....

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

"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...

"Lincoln's Spy follows the Civil War career of Charles A. Dana, who began the war as managing editor of the New York Tribune and was hired by Abraham Lincoln and War Secretary Edwin Stanton to be the government's roving troubleshooter and confidential informant at the front. Carl Guarneri tracks Dana's experiences, with plenty of never-before-examined sources and events, to provide a panorama of the war, with special emphasis on decisions about strategy...

"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...