At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.

(1954)
Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1947 2nd edition 1961) (ISBN 0-679-72310-2)
Editor Why the North Won the Civil War (1962) (ISBN 0-02-031660-7)
Civil War and Reconstruction (1961; 2001) (ISBN 0-393-97427-8) 2001 edition with Jean H. Randall at the University of Illinois. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960) prize-winning scholarly biography to 1860; Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970) biography from 1861.

David Herbert Donald (October 1 1920 – May 17 2009) was an American historian.