Explores the secret life of the men in blue and gray.

Contributing to this volume are some of the finest scholars specializing in Lincoln’s assassination. All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their originality, and their writing.

On November 11, 1940, 21 slow, canvas-covered British warplanes, launched from the carrier Illustrious, attacked the harbor at the Italian port of Taranto and put most of the Italian navy out of commission.

The 50,000 books about the war have told us in meticulous detail about the strategy, tactics, weapons, uniforms, canteens, famous generals, religious beliefs, personality quirks, fortifications, battles, sieges, gunboats, medical care, and ...

Among the court-martialed transgressors presented in this volume are an officer nicknamed ?Stumpy? because he tended to hide behind tree stumps during combat and a man tried for calling his superior a ?miserable reptile.

Recently discovered documents in Abraham Lincoln's own handwriting show that he personally intervened in many military justice cases, from trials involving spying, sabotage and desertion to ordinary criminal cases.

Lincoln reviewed over a thousand court-martial verdicts. His decisions not only determined life or death but also revealed his own character. Quotes and statisical analysis unveil surprises.

The author's book, fully referenced and annotated, brings these documents and images, verbatim and uncensored, to a public that would like to know what life was really like in mid-Victorian America.