Looking at Lincoln Through a Prism of War

SHILOH, Tenn. (NYTimes) - James M. McPherson probably knows more about the Civil War than anyone who was actually there. He talks about people like Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop turned not very effective Confederate general, as if they were old acquaintances. This is partly because Mr. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “Battle Cry of Freedom,” his one-volume history of the war, has spent most of his career studying that conflict, and partly because, as he remarked recently at the site of the famous battle here in southern Tennessee, strategies on both sides tended to break down, and battles quickly took on a logic, or illogic, of their own, with most units unaware of what was going on elsewhere. Moving armies at Shiloh was a little like herding cats, he said. Continued