Four books explore Lincoln and civil liberties, pivotal battles and Grant Civil War

Though nearly 150 years have passed since the echoes of the last shot, America's fascination with the Civil War and its personalities never seems to ebb. Among the ceaseless flow of new books about the conflict are these titles by a quartet of distinguished historians.

In "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" (Houghton Mifflin, 387 pp., $30), a history of the Civil War's first year, author William Marvel contends that Abraham Lincoln ran roughshod over the Constitution in order to save it.

Marvel, author of numerous Civil War histories, suggests Lincoln provoked the war unnecessarily, then exercised "unilateral authority and military might against the most fundamental elements of democracy, imprisoning duly elected representatives of the people, arresting opposition candidates and 'monitoring' elections with soldiers who refused dissident voters access to the polls." Not to mention closing down a few newspapers.

All true. But Marvel places much greater emphasis on these provocative charges than the circumstances that compelled Lincoln to do what he did, and sometimes it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in his account.

Polemics aside, Marvel provides a highly readable account of the war's first year, including detailed descriptions of the battles of Big Bethel, Bull Run and Ball's Bluff.

David Detzer's "Dissonance: The Turbulent Days Between Fort Sumter and Bull Run" (Harcourt, 371 pp., $27) also tackles the Civil War's beginnings, but his focus is on only the first six weeks of conflict, when Washington, D.C., was isolated and Lincoln paced restlessly in the White House waiting for soldiers who never seemed to come. The rebels, meanwhile, seized the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the Navy base at Portsmouth, Va. Many people feared Washington would be next.

Detzer, professor emeritus of history at Connecticut State University, provides a fast-paced narrative of the events of this critical time. He joins Marvel in faulting Lincoln for civil-rights violations, but notes he was driven by "extremist necessity." Nevertheless, Detzer deplores the lasting damage done, saying Lincoln "created precedents that other men, some far less scrupulous than he, have found useful."

"Dissonance" is the middle volume of a trilogy about the outbreak of the Civil War; the other volumes, "Allegiance" and "Donnybrook," were published previously.

"Fields of Honor: Pivotal Battles of the Civil War" (National Geographic, 448 pp., $28) is an entirely different kind of book, a series of transcribed battlefield-tour narratives by Edwin C. Bearss, former chief historian of the National Park Service and a familiar figure on Civil War television documentaries.

Bearss, possessor of a legendary near-photographic memory, provides vivid descriptions of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the battles of First Manassas (Bull Run), Shiloh, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Sherman's march through the Carolinas and Robert E. Lee's final retreat to Appomattox.

Mysteriously missing from this lineup of "pivotal" battles, however, are the 1862 Seven Days battles that marked Lee's emergence and changed the entire course of the war, and Sherman's 1864 capture of Atlanta that assured Lincoln's re-election as president.

The book also needs more maps and lacks many details in the ones it has. But Bearss' stirring accounts, laced with unique personal observations, more than compensate for these deficiencies.

"General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man" by Edward G. Longacre (Da Capo, 338 pp., $26) covers Grant's life from birth through the end of the Civil War, a subject already thoroughly mined by other biographers. But Longacre says his book is different because it concentrates on issues other biographers have not sufficiently considered. Among them: Grant's moral, ethical and religious views and his drinking habits.

Of the latter, Longacre says: "I am convinced that the general was, under criteria established by present-day medical specialists, an alcoholic." News flash! Longacre's findings about Grant's moral, ethical and religious views are similarly unrevealing.

Longacre is a veteran biographer of Civil War personalities, but he allowed some careless errors to creep into this one. For example, he has a youthful Grant diving into the "swift waters" of a lake and his account of the seizure of Forts Henry and Donelson suggests the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers flow from north to south instead of the other way around (Longacre isn't the first historian to make that mistake). But these errors will escape the notice of most readers.