The Story of Liberty

New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1878. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. [4], 415, [3] pages. Index. Decorative cover. Corners bumped and rubbed, Some wear and soiling to cover. Includes Introduction, Thirty-one Chapters, and 400 black and white illustrations. If while reading this "Story" you are roused to indignation, or pained at the recital of wrong and outrage, remember that out of endurance and sacrifice has come all that you hold most dear; so will you comprehend what Liberty has cost, and what it is worth. Charles Carleton Coffin (July 26, 1823 - March 2, 1896) was an American journalist, war correspondent, author and politician. Coffin was one of the best-known newspaper correspondents of the American Civil War. He has been called "the Ernie Pyle of his era," and a biographer, W. E. Griffis, referred to him as "a soldier of the pen and knight of the truth." Charles obtained employment with the Boston Journal newspaper. This led to another milestone in his life after Charles visited the Saratoga battlefield in 1854. Charles' grandfather had fought in this Revolutionary War battle in 1777, and the visit led Charles to reconstruct in his mind the positions and maneuvering of those who had participated. This interest would have a direct effect on his later reporting during the Civil War. Charles was a member of the group that traveled from Chicago to Springfield to advise Abraham Lincoln that he had won the party's nomination for the presidency. In his job as a newspaper reporter, he went on to cover the 1860 election campaign and was in Washington to cover Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861. The first major engagement between the Union and Confederate armies was the battle of Bull Run only a few miles out of Washington. Coffin was there, and his written accounts of the battle and its aftermath so impressed the editors of his old paper, the Boston Journal, that the paper hired him to "cover the war" at a salary of $25 per week. He worked alone, without assistants, and was frequently the first to get reports from the war's battlefields to the media. He was present at, or immediately after, most of the major battles in the eastern theater, including those of Antietam and Gettysburg. He was the first to break the story of the Battle of the Wilderness, and was to become the only news correspondent to serve throughout the entire war—from before the battle of Bull Run, through Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Charles Carleton Coffin was not only well-known to many U.S. political and military leaders, but to many noted U.S. writers and to a large number of foreign dignitaries. His name is listed on the War Correspondents Memorial Arch at Gathland, Maryland. For much of history humankind has been oppressed. We have suffered religious persecution, the tyranny of cruel monarchs, and suffered untold horrors due to war and famine. Yet, the modern world now has greater freedom than ever before. So how did this rise of liberty occur? Charles Carleton Coffin's fascinating work The Story of Liberty charts this remarkable progress. The history begins with King John of England and the civil war that developed during his reign when many barons refused to suffer anymore of his tyranny and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. From this starting point Coffin explains how various countries across Europe developed religious and political freedom in the subsequent centuries. He explains how Martin Luther questioned the hierarchy of the church and his powerful ideas were spread across the continent through the invention of the printing press. The quest from freedom and liberty is recorded from the turbulent medieval period right through the Reformation to the point when the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the eastern seaboard of America and began a new society based on liberty. This book is a remarkable history of the rise of political freedom in Europe and America and deserves to be read by every person who values the liberty that they hold.