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By Root 1591 0

leader of the new Republican party in the 1850s, and his presidency during the Civil War. It is intended to be both less and more than another biography. The chronology of Lincoln’s life has been traced in numerous works from the brief to the multivolume, and there is no need to tell the story again. (Those who wish to consult a chronology focusing on Lincoln, slavery, and emancipation will find one at the end of this book.) Many aspects of his career, including his marriage and law practice and the military course of the Civil War over which he presided, do not appear here except to the extent that they illuminate his relationship with slavery. But what follows is also more than a biography because my aim is to situate Lincoln within what Charles Sumner, the most outspoken foe of slavery in the U.S. Senate, called the “antislavery enterprise.” This social and political movement encompassed a wide variety of outlooks and practices. At one extreme, it included abolitionists who worked outside the party system and advocated an immediate end to slavery and the incorporation of the freed slaves as equal members of society. It also included those who adhered to what Sumner called “strictly constitutional endeavors,”5 including steps to prevent the westward expansion of slavery and, in some cases, plans for gradual emancipation with monetary compensation to slaveowners and the “colonization” of the freedpeople outside the United States. At various times, Lincoln occupied different places on this spectrum.

Too much recent work on Lincoln is self-referential; it explains his ideas and actions primarily in terms of his own character, psychology, legal training, or a political philosophy that remained constant throughout his life. My intent is to return Lincoln to his historical setting, tracing the evolution of his ideas in the context of the broad antislavery impulse and the unprecedented crisis the United States confronted during his adult life. Of course, the events and decisions discussed in this book appear in numerous biographies of Lincoln and histories of the Civil War. But I believe that casting a bright, concentrated light on Lincoln and the politics of slavery—with politics defined in the broadest sense, not simply as elections and office-holding but the shaping of opinion within the extended public sphere—can illuminate his life and his era in new ways. Given the size of the Lincoln literature, differences of interpretation exist on almost every issue discussed in this book. However, I have generally chosen to tell the story as I see it without engaging in debates with other historians, which would result in a much longer, and extremely tedious, narrative.

Like other presidents, Lincoln had to reach accommodations with a Congress whose members believed they had a role to play in shaping public policy. As a shrewd and experienced party leader both before and during his presidency, he had to be sensitive to all strands of political opinion. I am particularly interested, however, in Lincoln’s complex relationship with abolitionists, who strove to awaken the nation to the moral imperative of confronting the problem of slavery, and Radical Republicans, who represented the abolitionist sensibility within the political system. Too often, Lincoln is presented as a singular model of prudence and pragmatism while other critics of slavery are relegated to the fringe, caricatured as self-righteous fanatics with no sense of practical politics.6 I believe that this displays a misunderstanding of how politics operates in a democratic society.

Lincoln was strongly antislavery, but he was not an abolitionist or a Radical Republican and never claimed to be one. He made a sharp distinction between his frequently reiterated personal wish that “all men everywhere could be free”7 and his official duties as a legislator, congressman, and president in a legal and constitutional system that recognized the South’s right to property in slaves. Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation he continued to declare his preference for gradual