PROGRAM

In her new book, Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives, Candice Shy Hooper looks at the Civil War in a new way – by focusing on the extraordinary and influential lives of Jessie Frémont, Nelly McClellan, Ellen Sherman, and Julia Grant, the wives of Abraham Lincoln’s top generals. They were their husbands closest confidantes and had a profound impact on the generals’ ambitions and actions. Most important, the women’s own attitudes toward and relationships with Lincoln had major historical significance. Ms. Hooper will be in conversation with Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House and the author, most recently, of Lincoln and the Press, to discuss the women’s lives and political attitudes, and the ways in which their relationships with their husbands and their personal opinions of the president of the United States had national and historical consequences.