Diary Of Gideon Welles

Gideon Welles’s 1861 appointment as secretary of the navy placed him at the hub of Union planning for the Civil War and in the midst of the powerful personalities vying for influence in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Although Welles initially knew little of naval matters, he rebuilt a service depleted by Confederate defections, planned actions that gave the Union badly needed victories in the war’s early days, and oversaw a blockade that weakened the South’s economy. Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He just as easily waxes eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extols the virtues of Lincoln, and drops in a tidbit of Washington gossip. Carefully edited and extensively annotated, this edition contains a wealth of supplementary material. The appendixes include short biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the retrospective Welles wrote after leaving office covering the period missing from the diary proper, and important letters regarding naval matters and international law.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Abraham Lincoln brought together one of the most remarkable Cabinet's in presidential history. Among them was Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson. Welles describes his role and that of many other prominent men of his day in this fascinating chronicle of the American Civil War and its aftermath. You'll get an inside view of the machinations within and around Lincoln's administration, along with personal anecdotes. Welles brilliantly took a Navy Department in disarray and forged it into a formidable instrument of Union power. He was instrumental in helping to win the war. Long used as a primary source for Lincoln scholars, you can now read Gideon Welles wonderful diaries on your Kindle, well-formatted for a superior reading experience. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

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