Lincoln Takes Command: The Campaign to Seize Norfolk and the Destruction of the CSS Virginia

On a rainy evening during the Civil War’s second May, President Abraham Lincoln and two of his cabinet secretaries boarded the revenue cutter Miami and sailed to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. There, for the first and only time in our country’s history, a sitting president assumed direct control of military forces, land and sea, to launch a campaign with wide—ranging consequences. This fascinating and multi—dimensional slice of the war and its effect on the president is but little—...