• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1828 0

southerners would have learned to acknowledge the rights of the former slaves. Had they done so, blacks and the nation might have been spared the long nightmare of disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence that followed the end of Reconstruction. Or, perhaps, even this Reconstruction plan would have aroused violent opposition in the South. Lincoln would then have faced the alternative that in fact came to confront Congress: whether to move forward to full black suffrage and a vigorous federal commitment to protect blacks’ rights as citizens, or relegate the freedpeople to quasi-freedom under the domination of their former masters. No one can say what would have happened then, for by now we have advanced far into the realm of the purely speculative.

Lincoln did not enter the White House expecting to preside over the destruction of slavery. A powerful combination of events, as we have seen, propelled him down the road to emancipation and then to a reconsideration of the place blacks would occupy in a post-slavery America. Of course, the unprecedented crisis in which, as one member of Congress put it, “the events of an entire century transpire in a year,” made change the order of the day. Yet as the presidency of his successor demonstrated, not all men placed in a similar situation possessed the capacity for growth, the essence of Lincoln’s greatness. “I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln,” the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote one week before his death. “With all his deficiencies, it must be admitted that he has grown continuously; and considering how slavery had weakened and perverted the moral sense of the whole country, it was great good luck to have the people elect a man who was willing to grow.”28

Two months after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one abolitionist wrote that “to make the proclamation a success, we must make freedom a blessing to the freed.”29 The question of how to do so would long outlive Lincoln and the Civil War.

Acknowledgments

BEGINNING WITH MY FIRST WORK OF HISTORY, a study of the ideology of the Republican party before the Civil War published four decades ago, Abraham Lincoln has played an important part in my historical scholarship. But until now, he has not occupied center stage. Nonetheless, like so many other students of the American past, I have always been fascinated by Lincoln and what his life tells us about our society and its history.

In writing this book, I owe my greatest debt to the legions of historians who have studied, from every possible angle, Lincoln and his era. I want to single out for special thanks a number of scholars who have published books during the past decade or so that make available previously inaccessible documentary sources related to Lincoln: Michael Burlingame, for editing a series of volumes of writings by persons close to Lincoln; Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, for compiling and evaluating later recollections of Lincoln’s words; Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, for gathering and publishing the interviews conducted by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon; and the staff of the Lincoln Legal Papers project, who have produced in digital form the records of Lincoln’s law career.

Indeed, thanks to the digital revolution of the past decade, a vast array of primary sources relevant to the study of Lincoln are now readily available online, making the task of the researcher immeasurably less onerous. I thank John Tofanelli of the Columbia University Libraries for assisting me with research on digital sources. Incongruous as it may seem, much of the research for this book in online resources such as the Official Records of the Civil War, the Congressional Globe, and the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as Lincoln’s Collected Works at the website of the Abraham Lincoln Association, was conducted in the spring of 2008 when I was fortunate enough to serve as a Leverhulme Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University, University of London. I thank the Leverhulme Trust