Dorothy Wickenden at the New York Times:
Who was Appleton Oaksmith? One contemporary described him as a “good seaman, & a bold & daring officer.” His enemies, President Abraham Lincoln among them, judged him a scoundrel and a traitor. Oaksmith, writing six years after the Civil War, wasn’t sure what to think: “I look upon myself sometimes with a sort of doubt as to my own identity.”
Jonathan W. White, a prizewinning Civil War historian, finds in Oaksmith’s spectacularly misguided life both a gripping yarn set far from the battlefields and a way to dramatize Lincoln’s determination to eliminate the African slave trade.
As a young seafaring adventurer in the 1850s, Oaksmith armed mercenaries in Nicaragua and joined the liberation movement in Cuba. In 1859, he started a magazine, which foundered and left him bankrupt. As a Tammany Hall Democrat, he attempted to broker a misbegotten agreement between North and South. After Lincoln took office, in 1861, Oaksmith became a shipping agent, outfitting old whaling ships.
more here.