Reviewed by: Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo Rachel A. Shelden Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Allen C. Guelzo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-01998-4328-2, 592 pp., paper, $19.95. For almost twenty years, Allen C. Guelzo, Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, has been at the forefront of Civil War–era scholarship. In particular, he has focused his analytical efforts on the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, publishing books covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the origins of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln’s presidential leadership, among others. Guelzo’s recognition of the sixteenth president’s central place in American memory helps provide a frame for Fateful Lightning, a new textbook-length overview of the Civil War period. The book begins with Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered only weeks before John Wilkes Booth gunned down the president. In the address, Guelzo explains, Lincoln identified three causes of the war: the politics of the Union, the sociology of the South, and the problems of territorial expansion. These causes introduce the sectional problems that led to warfare in Guelzo’s first three chapters. Ultimately, he argues, these problems produced a “fatal sequence of public events” from 1820 to 1861 that “can be visualized as a game of balances, with the Union as the balance point along the beam, and the two rays representing the interests of North and South, slave and free” (54). The meat of Guelzo’s book then covers the Civil War primarily from the perspective of northern political and military events. Here Guelzo focuses in particular on the [End Page 237] movement toward emancipation and the impact of the war on northern society. Chapters 4 and 5 take the war through 1862, covering important signposts such as Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan, the rise of George B. McClellan, and Ulysses S. Grant’s successes in the West. The next three chapters weave more thematic topics through the first half of the war, detailing the life of the common Civil War soldier, the rise of northern industry in supplying the Union army, and military and political command during 1863. The final wartime chapters pay lip service to events and changes in northern and southern society, ranging from conscription, bread riots, and religion to African American soldiers, women, and refugees. A final chapter, titled “A Dim Shore Ahead,” takes the reader from Sherman’s March to the 1876 election. In this section Guelzo focuses a mere thirty pages on the period of Reconstruction, recounting details of the Andrew Johnson and Grant administrations such as impeachment, the rise of carpetbaggers and scalawags, the Panic of 1873, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Redeemers. Guelzo concludes the book with a short epilogue touching on army veterans, the Lost Cause, and the lasting effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the southern economy. Guelzo’s gift for engaging storytelling will make Fateful Lightning a success for those interested in a broad view of the Civil War period. Guelzo has a firm command of the political events of the mid-nineteenth century, and his description of military movements is both easy to read and skillfully explained. Unsurprisingly, his attention to detail in Lincoln’s life shines through in sections on Lincoln’s relationship with his cabinet, his often overblown differences with the Radical Republicans, and even his nightmares. Still, Guelzo’s work is less likely to resonate with scholars of the period. Although he has read extensively on the political and structural forces that shaped the Civil War era, any real engagement with the experiences of average Americans—from women and African Americans to northern laborers and southern yeomen—remains absent. Nor does the section entitled “further reading” in the back of the book provide a roadmap for engaging with these subjects. Most problematic is the failure to provide an introduction or conclusion that could direct the reader to his scholarly contribution to Civil War–era history. Instead, Guelzo peppers the text with a few choice historiographical debates, many of which seem out...