Chapter 1 has not been previously published. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 are adapted from review essays that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. I own the copyright to these essays, and I am grateful to the NYRB for giving me carte blanche to use them in this changed format, and to Robert Silvers for his invitations to review the books that provided the basis for my analyses of several important Civil War issues. Chapter 5, to which I also own the copyright, was initially published in Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackey, edited by Raymond Arsenault and Orville Vernon Burton (Montgomery, Ala.: New South Books, 2013). Chapter 6 first appeared in the October 2014 issue of the Journal of Military History. I am indebted to the Society for Military History for permission to publish it herein. Chapter 9, to which I own the copyright, was first included in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, edited by Eric Foner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). Chapter 10 was originally titled “My Enemies Are Crushed: Lincoln and McClellan” and appeared in Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War, edited by Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Chapter 11 initially appeared in Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America’s Greatest Leader, edited by Frank J. Williams and William D. Peterson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). Chapter 12 was first published in The Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War, edited by Williamson Murray and Jim Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). I am grateful to these three publishers for permission to reprint these essays.