{"id":1957,"date":"2016-03-30T08:41:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T14:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1957"},"modified":"2016-04-13T08:42:19","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T14:42:19","slug":"the-presidents-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1957","title":{"rendered":"The Presidents’ War"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Chris DeRose, 2014, Lyons Press, Guilford Connecticut<\/p>\n

This was a very interesting book for me to read as it had a wealth of information about the five former presidents who were alive when the Civil War began.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I didn’t know much at all about these presidents, much less about their support or lack of it for Lincoln’s efforts to prosecute the war.<\/p>\n

The efforts of the former presidents during the war varied from mild support (Martin Van Buran, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan) to\u00c2\u00a0vigorous opposition\u00c2\u00a0via promotion of slavery (Franklin Pierce), to outright treason\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0engagement in the Confederacy (John Tyler).\u00c2\u00a0 None of the former presidents gave their whole-hearted support to the\u00c2\u00a0northern cause, however.<\/p>\n

As I read the book I thought of our current president and the silence that George W. Bush has maintained\u00c2\u00a0since he left office.\u00c2\u00a0 With the exception of a bit of politicking on behalf of his brother’s failed presidential campaign, George W. Bush has been fairly silent on the issues.\u00c2\u00a0 After reading this book, it appears that this may be the sensible course.\u00c2\u00a0 The president has a job to attend to and it appears that the efforts of the five former presidents prior to and during Lincoln’s term probably did more harm than good.<\/p>\n

I would recommend this book to anyone having an interest in reading about some little-known history during that time period.\"3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Chris DeRose, 2014, Lyons Press, Guilford Connecticut This was a very interesting book for me to read as it had a wealth of information about the five former presidents who were alive when the Civil War began.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I didn’t know …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[26,16],"class_list":["post-1957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-civil-war","tag-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1958,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions\/1958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}