References
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School web site. Found at: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm. Yale Law School's collection of important legal, diplomatic, and historical documents. The site contains the text of numerous documents of importance to this essay, including South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification, the Crittenden Amendment, the Confederate Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address.
Encyclopedia Britannica Concise article containing the 1860 election results. Found at: http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/art-67666. Total votes and electoral college votes from the 1860 U.S. presidential election.
Harper's Weekly presidential elections web page. Copyright 1998–2005 HarpWeek, LLC. Found at: http://elections.harpweek.com/1860/Overview-1860-1.htm. Information on United States presidential elections culled from past issues of Harper's Weekly.
The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. Copyright 1988, 2003. Published by Oxford University Press. An illustrated edition of James McPherson's Pulitzer Prize winning Battle Cry of Freedom. This is the best single volume work about the war. It is particularly strong in explaining the social and political events that lead to the American Civil War.
"Lincoln Takes Charge" by David Herbert Donald. In With My Face To The Enemy, edited by Robert Cowley, copyright 2001 and published by Putnam. An essay covering the actions taken by Lincoln from his inauguration until the Battle of Bull Run.
Leaders of the Lost Cause: New Perspectives on the Confederate High Command edited by Gary H. Gallagher and Joseph T. Glatthaar. Copyright 2004 and published by Stackpole Books. The book is a series of eight essays, one for each of the men who achieved the rank of full general in the Confederate army — the south's highest rank. All though several essays mention Jefferson Davis, the essay "'Snarl and Sneer and Quarrel': General Joseph E. Johnston and an Obsession with Rank" by Robert K. Krick was the most useful for this essay, as it mentions Davis' early days at West Point. Krick's essay is also the most biased, as he gives the impression of being unduly harsh on Johnston. The essay on Robert E. Lee doesn't add much that wasn't already known (but how could it), but the other essays are very good, particularly that of Samuel Cooper, the highest ranking officer in the Confederacy.
The National Archives (NARA) historical elections results web site. Found at: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/historical.html. This is the United States National Archive electoral college web site. It contains lots of historical data on every United States federal election.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Copyright 1994. Published by Simon and Schuster. An excellent and detailed examination of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, from the Republican Convention to the 1860 election, and through the war. It is not just a Lincoln biography (though there is a fair bit of biographical information on Lincoln). It focuses on the political side of the war, which few books do.
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Also known as the Army Official Records, or simply the Official Records (the latter is not exactly accurate, as it ignores the official records of the navies involved in the conflict, which were published separately). Originally published by the Government Printing Office in 1880. Available on The Civil War CD-Rom, produced by Guild Press of Indiana, copyright 1997, and also posted online. The CD-ROM from Guild Press has the advantages that you can cut and paste the text and you don't have to be connected to the Internet. Be aware that there are errors in the Guild Press edition where their Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software made a mistake translating scanned pages into text (the text doesn't appear to have been adequately proofread). The online archive scanned each page of the books and displays the pages as graphics. You can't cut and paste, but there are no OCR errors.
What They Fought For, 1861–1865 by James McPherson. Copyright 1995. Published by Doubleday. Originally published in hardcover by Louisiana State University Press. A short book (85 pages) covering the reasons why northerners and southerners fought. It describes the reason men on both sides of the conflict went to war, but also the reasons they continued to fight once they were exposed to the savagery of battle.
Who Was Who in the Union and Who Was Who in the Confederacy by Stewart Sifakis. Copyright 1988. Published by Facts On File. Quick histories of the major participants of the Civil War. Two volume set, making up Who Was Who in the Civil War.
