The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival.

"A great American tale told with a deft historical eye, painstaking analysis, and a supple clarity of writing.”—Jean Baker “My husband considered you a dear friend,” Mary Todd Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglass in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination. The frontier lawyer and the former slave, the cautious politician and the fiery reformer, the President and the most famous black man in America—their lives traced different paths that finally met in the bloody landscape of secession, Civil War, and emancipation. Opponents at first, they gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. Their three meetings in the White House signaled a profound shift in the direction of the Civil War, and in the fate of the United States. James Oakes has written a masterful narrative history, bringing two iconic figures to life and shedding new light on the central issues of slavery, race, and equality in Civil War America.

Written in 1864 by a political contemporary, this is a work of nineteenth-century American biographic literature. It contains Lincoln's most masterful speeches and writings, along with a contemporary history of the Civil War.

Born in Connecticut in 1832, Belden went to California in 1853. He served on the Nevada County Court from 1857 to 1861, in the State Senate from 1865 to 1868, and on the District and Superior Courts of Santa Clara County from 1871 until just before his death in 1888.