Books for the Civil War Buff in Your Life

Abraham Lincoln spent much of his presidency traveling. His visits to Antietam to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to Pennsylvania for the famed Gettysburg Address are well remembered. During the course of the war, Lincoln also traveled to West Point and Harpers Ferry. As hostilities drew to a close, he spent time on the Virginia battlefields, from Petersburg to Richmond and beyond. In this new edition of Lincoln's Wartime Travels, John W. Schildt details visits to wounded soldiers both Union and Confederate, conferences with generals and the logistics of getting a wartime president from place to place.

The Petersen House was one of many similar, ordinary buildings on Tenth Street during the Civil War. On April 15, 1865, the home became forever known as the "House Where Lincoln Died." Over the next six decades, three families occupied the building as a home, a business, and finally, as a museum. Within a decade after the death of Abraham Lincoln, the home's namesakes were dead of suspicious causes, their possessions auctioned and their family forever fractured. The next owners, weary of the constant stream of visitors requesting to see the room where the martyred president died, lasted less than a decade. The house was then occupied by veteran Lincoln collector Osborn H. Oldroyd, who moved his array of objects from the Lincoln home in Springfield into the House Where Lincoln Died. For the next thirty-three years, it remained the only museum devoted to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Oldroyd's collection was purchased by the U.S. government in 1926, moved across the street, and is today on display at Ford's Theatre. As for that "ordinary" house on Tenth Street? It survives as the spot where Abraham Lincoln began his journey to secular sainthood.

Whether it is called shell shock, soldier's heart or PTSD, the devastation that war leaves in its wake is present throughout history. Soldiers and healthcare workers alike experienced such symptoms as depression, anxiety, rapid pulse and cardiac complications during the Civil War. Prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Medal of Honor winner Mary Edwards Walker, Clara Barton and others were instrumental in supporting healthcare for soldiers and medical workers. After the war, medical establishments in New York and Washington, D.C., arose to heal veterans physically and mentally. In 1866, Congress created the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, one of many vital attempts to provide postwar medical support. Author Heather Butts recounts the heroism of those who fought, healed and suffered long after the war ended.

Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to the nation's capital at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman eventually served as a volunteer "hospital missionary," making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wounded soldiers in the next three years. With the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman became poet laureate of the Civil War, aligning his legacy with that of Abraham Lincoln. He remained in Washington until 1873 as a federal clerk, engaging in a dazzling literary circle and fostering his longest romantic relationship, with Peter Doyle. Author Garrett Peck details the definitive account of Walt Whitman's decade in the nation's capital.