Abraham Lincoln is often lauded as one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States of America. His involvement in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery have led to the reverence of his name.

Having deep family roots in the United States, traceable to colonial times, author Dr. W. Terry Hardgrave has a long-held family interest in the principles and preservation of constitutional republics. As a young adult, Dr. Hardgrave began to discover inconsistencies in the traditional historical narrative surrounding the Civil War. He found himself asking the following questions:
How could President Lincoln promise to preserve the integrity of the States in his first Inaugural Address and invade Maryland less than two months later?
If the war was about abolishing slavery, why was General Grant's wife a slave-holder during the war?
If John Wilkes Booth was simply a pro-slavery Southern sympathizer, why did he yell, "Sic Semper Tyrannis," after shooting President Lincoln instead of "Slavery Forever" or "Dixie Forever" or something similar?
If President Lincoln actually preserved the Union, why did the States have to be re-admitted to the Union during Reconstruction?

It is those inconsistencies that led Dr. Hardgrave on his quest for more detail and more realistic answers. Civil Coercion: The Constitutional Violations of the Lincoln Administration (1861-1865) is the result of his inquiries into the official records, accounts, speeches, and other publications. Through this book, Dr. Hardgrave hopes to prompt readers into their own research by providing them with facts, using a minimum of biased opinion, regarding the Constitutional violations of the Lincoln administration.