Lincoln and the Democrats

Mark E. Neely, Jr is Emeritus Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, specialising in political and constitutional history. His book, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberty (1992), won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

• 1. Beyond politics: how the North won the Civil War; 2. The elections of 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the invention of the Democratic Party myth; 3. The problem of a loyal opposition; 4. The elusive constitutionalism of the Democratic Party; 5. Lincoln, the Constitution, and the birth of human rights.

'In this book, Mark Neely, Jr outlines what he considers to be the five big questions of the Civil War. And he gets them spot-on. We can pursue many other aspects and interests of the Civil War era, but these are the nuclear-core questions. And not only does he pose the right questions, he goes one better. He gives the right answers. This is the Civil War book we have been waiting for, and for a long time.' Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania