Dahlgren Update, Redux

Stephen W. Sears was kind enough to agree to write a foreword to the Dahlgren biography for me. In addition to being a terrific writer in his own right, Steve’s done a lot of editing in his day, including serving as an editor of the late, lamented American Heritage magazine. Steve not only wrote an excellent foreword for the book, he also gave me some really good suggestions for making it a better book.

I had originally written the conclusion by presenting the range of possibilities for what Lincoln knew and when he knew it and then permitting the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about this critical issue. Steve suggested that I should instead take a position–tell the reader what I think is the truth, based on the evidence–while dealing with the other possibilities and by using the evidence to eliminate them. I did so. It went through several drafts of re-write, and Steve gave me excellent feedback on each of those drafts.

It’s finally done. It’s at the point where I think it’s finished, and where I think that the conclusions stated are well-supported by the evidence at hand.

I also added some good new material from the very useful volume of the notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman that just add good insight to the overall manuscript, some of which I have already mentioned here. The addition of this material has only further bolstered the quality of this book.

I submitted the revised pieces of the manuscript to Dan Hoisington, the publisher of Edinborough Press, who is currently considering the manuscript for publication.