Content area
Full Text
Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery. By Richard Striner. (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 320. Cloth, $28.00.)
Act of Justice: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War. By Burrus M. Carnahan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. 216. Cloth, $40.00.)
Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Edited by Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. 320. Cloth, $34.95.)
Few images in American history are as durable as Abraham Lincoln the Great Emancipator. But recently his reputation as an icon of racial equality has been called into question. In 2000 Lerone Bennett published Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, a polemic that assaulted nearly every aspect of Lincoln's Great Emancipator image. Three years later, Thomas DiLorenzo published The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, in which he argued that Lincoln's emancipation policies were a morally empty cover for the hidden purpose of vastly expanding the federal government's size and power.
Few Civil War scholars take Bennett or DiLorenzo seriously, pointing to their narrow political agendas and faulty research. But their arguments do seem to have made inroads into the general public. While Lincoln's good standing among most Americans as a defender of racial equality and freedom remains intact, it would be fair to suggest that, in some quarters at least, his reputation on that score is ambivalent - more so perhaps than at any time since his death.
But if there ever was a tide of opinion running against Lincoln the Great Emancipator, that may now be turning. Three new books have appeared that all, to some extent, defend Lincoln as a liberator of slaves.
Of the three, Richard Striner's Father Abraham is the most unabashedly sympathetic toward Lincoln. Providing a broad survey of Lincoln's political career from the 1850s through the Civil War, Striner sees in his rhetoric and his policies an ongoing and palpable moral revulsion at the peculiar institution, and consistent efforts to end its existence as soon as possible. "Lincoln was a masterful antislavery leader," Striner writes, and "a moral visionary . . . blessed with extraordinary talent in the orchestration of power" (1). Indeed, he believes, Lincoln wanted...