"Victims: A True Story of the Civil War," by Phillip Shaw Paludan, is an excellent book about the time period surrounding the Civil War. This book mainly focuses on the events leading up to the Shelton Laurel Massacre. Paludan gives a vivid description of what went on during this time and he gives the reader accurate details describing the massacre. The Shelton Laurel Massacre was a brutal killing of men and boys from the ages of 13-59 by the Confederate soldiers in Shelton Laurel, North Carolina. In this book, Laurel gives the reader a vivid picture of how it happened and what really went on.

The book Victims: A True Story of the Civil War by Phillip Shaw Paludan is about the Shelton Laurel killings. Shelton Laurel is a remote Appalachian town in North Carolina. Despite its location in the Confederacy, there remained a strong tie to the Union and because of this it became a target for both Confederate and Union armies.

The people of Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian mountains were simple people. The area was home to related families and most people were very poor farmers. As in many small areas, what family you belong to and their actions affect everything. Paludan explained it best when he said, "juries in county seats could and did ignore the law and evidence to acquit or convict people they liked or disliked, people whose values or whose kin they did or did not respect," (Paludan, 24). The mountain people had a habit of using politics to satisfy personal vengeance. When the Civil War started, "the Unionism of Western North Carolina of which we heard so much during the war...was less a love for the Union than a personal hatred of those who went into the Rebellion. It was not so much an uprising for the government as against a certain ruling class," (Paludan, 62). The Civil War was an opportunity for people to use their new found power to gain personal revenge. People who were pro-confederate tended to be either rich farmers with slaves or "poor whites, profoundly hostile to blacks and most vulnerable to any change in the social and economic structure," (Paludan, 63). Pro-Unionists tended to be people who were poor farmers with no slaves or people who thought succession was treason. The people of the mountains used the "opportunity that the war brought to revenge old debts and to loot, plunder, and terrorize," (Paludan, 77).

The people's terrorism generally took the form of guerrilla warfare; it was like a mini civil war in the mountains of the Appalachians. The Confederates tried to maintain control of the area and recruit soldiers for their side, but at the same time the Unionists tried to persuade mountain Unionists to attack the Confederacy. The tensions were made worse when on April 16, 1862 the Confederate Congress passed a conscription that forced all men 18 to 35 to join the army. This was a huge problem for mountain farmers. Men were needed to plant and harvest crops, without them many families would go hungry or starve. The "mutual killing, the burning of barns, houses, and fields, the slaughter of livestock all crippled the productivity of the region's farm," (Paludan, 80). If this wasn't already enough there was a salt shortage. The shortage was significant because without salt meat could not be properly stored.

These problems soon became too much to bare and in January of 1863 a group of fifty mean raided the nearby town of Marshall. Marshall was the county seat of Madison County and contained Salt storages. These fifty men, mostly deserters from Confederate armies, and some from Shelton Laurel raided the town stealing salt, blankets, and anything else of value. The confederate army soon heard of the raid on Marshall. General Heth sent James Keith and Lawrence Allen to punish the rebels. Allen had personal interest in punishing the rebels who raided Marshall. His home was among the buildings that were looted. His family was terrorized and he wanted revenge. Thirteen prisoners, ranging from the age of thirteen to fifty-nine, were taken from the Shelton Laurel area and were shot to death. The problem with this is that "international law said while guerrillas could be killed if engaged in battle and could be denied the right to become prisoners, once they had been captured they could not be executed without legal proceedings to determine their status as guerrillas and their guilt for killing or destroying," (Paludan, 87-88). The men Allen and Keith killed were captured from their homes, it was not certain that they were even guerrillas. Even if they were guerrillas they had been taken prisoner and therefore could not be killed without legal proceedings.

Despite the murders of thirteen innocent people, there was not much of a public outcry. The people of the Confederacy and the Union were probably beginning to believe that war was brutal and that very bad things happen to innocent people. They began to except and expect the brutality. "Less than a month after the North Carolina killings gained national killings, William C. Quantrill and Lawrence, Kansas, shocked public consciousness with the story of 155 murders," (Paludan, 116). Stories of death and destruction were becoming common.

This is not a bad book, and in fact offers a solid description and assessment of the Lincoln Administration.

Paludan describes the working of Lincoln's government well, including the personalities and major policy issues they faced. He does a good job in explaining the manueverings between Salmon P. Chase and Lincoln for dominance of the Administration and later for the 1864 Repbulican Party nomination. Also described thoroughly is Lincoln's Louisianna reconstruction plan, which gives a pretty plausible map to what reconstruction could have looked like had Booth not intervened.

I found the writing average. While the book explains the subject well enough, the prose is more workmanlike. It didn't reach the level of engrossing style other chronicler's of Lincoln and his government have.

Overall, not bad.

As the title indicates, this is not a biography of Abraham Lincoln. It is, instead, a narrow, but detailed and incisive study of Lincoln's exercise of executive power between his election in 1860 and his assassination in 1865. This is important because, as author Philip Shaw Paludan explains: "No president had larger challenges than Abraham Lincoln." And Paludan proceeds to state the obvious, that Lincoln was "responsible for two enormous accomplishments that are part of folk legend as well as fact. He saved the Union and he freed the slaves." No other president did so much in so little time, and Paludan explains why. As a result, within its limited confines, this book is excellent!

Paludan demonstrates in the chapter entitled "Assembling the Cast: Winter 1860-61," that Lincoln, as president-elect, was a shrewd politician. According to Paludan: "Lincoln could be effective only if he unified the six-year-old Republican party," so one of his first appointments was "his strongest party rival," William Seward, Senator from New York, as secretary of state. As political payback for delivering Pennsylvania to the Republicans in 1860, Lincoln was obliged to appoint the notoriously-corrupt Simon Cameron Secretary of War. To counter that stench, Lincoln named as his secretary of the navy Connecticut newspaper editor Gideon Welles, who "had a glowing reputation for honesty." Within a year, Cameron also proved to be incompetent, and, in 1862, Lincoln replaced him with Edwin Stanton, who proved to be not only a man of great integrity but a very capable manager as well. It proved to be one of the most talented cabinets in American history, although Paludan makes clear that its operations were not always harmonious, most notably during the "cabinet crisis" of December 1862.

With most of the executive departments in capable hands, Lincoln "involved himself actively in matters of strategy," claiming "'war power' authority to use his office to the limits." Lincoln's focus on military affairs was essential because the Civil War generally went badly for the Union for the first year. Paludan ably demonstrates that even while Lincoln struggled to find generals who had both the talents and temperament to be successful, the Union was "forging the resources of war," which eventually proved decisive. Gen. George McClellan was a brilliant military administrator but proved much too cautious in the field, appalled by the "mangled corpses and the poor suffering wounded. Lincoln eventually lost confidence in McClellan, and he had to be replaced. One of McClellan's eventual successors, Gen. George Meade, won the great victory at Gettysburg in July 1863, but the Union did fully gain the initiative in the field until Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who won an equally great victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi almost on the same day, was appointed general in chief in March 1864.

Lincoln's original war aim was merely to restore the Union. But the costs, human and material, of the war's first two years, made eradication of slavery a necessity. Following the battle of Antietam in September 1862, which was a "tactical draw but a strategic victory" for the Union, Lincoln announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The issue then became: What was to be done with the former slaves? In December, Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment for the federal government to pay to colonize any blacks who wished to emigrate, but blacks "rejected it, abolitionists had condemned it," and this "doubtful solution" was beyond the practical realities of the time. Even while the war continued to rage, the prospective problems of reconstruction never were far from Lincoln's mind, and, according to Paludan, this difficult issue increasingly divided the president from radical Republicans.

Paludan writes that, while the radicals favored confiscation of land which had prospered from slave labor, Lincoln believed in "peaceful, gradual, compensated emancipation." Lincoln opposed the harsh remedy of confiscation and believed that the Constitution permitted him to free the slaves only "in places where war was being made." The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 potentially freed 3 million slaves but did not mention colonization or compensated emancipation. Nevertheless, the emancipation issue proved controversial. Solidly Republican New England remained largely committed to the war, but, according to Paludan: "Especially in the regions of the Middle West settled from the South and in cities where job competition existed between the races, people resented the idea of fighting in order to free blacks."

Equally controversial was the Emancipation Proclamation's "arming of black freedom fighters." According to Paludan, "Lincoln and his party clearly were committed to Union and to emancipation and to the belief that the two were linked indissolubly by the need for black soldiers." Almost 180,000 black troops were serving in Union armies by the end of the war. Lincoln was very conscious of the importance of maintaining the national moral, and, in Paludan's view, northern whites increasingly recognized the benefits of having black soldiers defend the Union.

According to Paludan, the Union's victory was in large part a result of Lincoln's "devotion to and mastery of the political-constitutional institutions of his time." Some Civil War buffs and many general readers are likely to find this book rather dry because it focuses on the science of politics. But, as Paludan writes, the preservation of the Union "was achieved chiefly through an extraordinary outreach of national authority." This book is an exceptionally thoughtful account of the exercise of executive power during the most serious crisis in American history.

Like one of the previous reviewers, I too have been a previous student of Professor Paluden at the University of Kansas. I count him as one of the instructors that have fueled a passion in me to study the civil war period. Unlike the previous reviewer, I have had the benefit of having read this book before offering an opinion. Prof. Paluden offers an extremely well researched account of the civil war presidency of Lincoln. This work includes statistics and facts you simply cannot get from documentaries or other accounts. He correctly paints Lincoln as a master politician and cuts through the mythology of the man. Was Lincoln morally opposed to slavery...yes. Was he willing to run on an abolitionist platform?? Hell no, not and get elected during that time period. Paluden's real gift is painting a picture of the period and making folks realize just how important politics was in the 19th Century to all Americans (80-90% voter turnout). Unlike the previous reviewer, I have never noted the negative side of Prof. Paluden. He does have an ego, but, like has been said of his subject "no great man was ever modest". Thanks for a wonderful book professor. (Jayhawk Class of 1995).