Few events in U.S. history are as romanticized as the Civil War. Many of its figures seem to be cast from marble, immune from the “picklocks of biographers,” as the poet Stephen Vincent Benet famously said of Robert E. Lee. Perhaps none have been more mythologized than Abraham Lincoln. But as Nigel Hamilton shows in his brilliant new book, The War of the Presidents: Lincoln vs. Davis, the 16th president wasn’t cast from stone.

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