Cole's first monograph, "The Whig Party in the South", won the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association in 1912. Cole's speech regarding Lincoln's House Divided Speech was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1923. His third book, titled "Irrepressible Conflict, 1850‐65", was a social, economic, and cultural history of the Civil War and was published by Macmillan Publishers in 1934.