Sublime

Three weeks later he was promoted to lieutenant general, leapfrogging sixty-six major generals (including George Patton and Jacob Devers) who were considerably senior.

Russell almost never forgot the overriding strategic consideration: that, if the South was to win, it needed allies, and opposition to desegregation must therefore be made as respectable as possible in the North, respectable to Republican senators. Nevertheless, the threat to the southern way of life grew steadily more serious during the war. Russe

Under Belle Moskowitz’s tutelage, Bob Moses had changed from an uncompromising idealist to a man willing to deal with practical considerations; now the alteration had become more drastic. Under her tutelage, he had been learning the politicians’ way; now he almost seemed to have joined their ranks.

The South, he said, was solidly Democratic because of “the realization that the subjugation of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself. And we shall recognize no emancipation, nor shall we proclaim any deliverer, that f

As did military command for Lincoln, who knew without having to read Clausewitz that wars, however ferocious, must serve, not consume, the states waging them. War could never be an end in itself, but it could be the means by which an endangered state saved itself. And Lincoln saw that a civil war—which he’d allowed to be forced upon him—might also