Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Birth of a New America

Horrific battles, murderous intrigues, and dramatic reversals of fortune animate this rousing panorama of the Civil War’s climax. Historian Ellsworth (The Ground Breaking) recaps the concluding year of the conflict, from the spring of 1864, when war-weariness gripped the North and President Lincoln was expected to lose the November election, to the April 1865 surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s army and the inauguration of Lincoln for a second term—followed by his murder. Ellsworth’s episodic narrative includes gripping combat scenes from Union general Ulysses S. Grant’s victorious campaign, but the focus is more on Confederate intrigues in Washington, D.C., especially on John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to first kidnap, and then assassinate, Lincoln. Ellsworth’s fascinating portrait of Booth paints him as a charismatic figure—he was a star actor whose good looks, intensity, and stage swashbuckling captivated audiences—but also a rabid racist seething with a prickly sense of entitlement. The Booth-Lincoln showdown embodies a rich view of the Civil War as a contest between irreconcilable societies: a South shackled to a dying slave system, and a dynamic North moving, slowly but surely, toward racial equality—prodded along by the freedmen, Black soldiers, and activists demanding justice whom Ellsworth spotlights. It’s a passionate and elegant chronicle of one of the most dramatic years in American history, torn agonizingly between triumph and tragedy. (July)