Eric Foner Edits Essays On Lincoln
Illustrated, 336 pages, 2008. W.W. Norton and Company, 500 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10110, $27.95 plus shipping. Public monuments and civic sculpture erected to the memory of a person or event often tell us more about those who commissioned the piece than the person or event being commemorated. It is no less so with books, and this new compilation of Lincoln essays, Our Lincoln, by some of the nation’s foremost Civil War and antebellum period scholars is no exception. Readers will find a veritable potpourri of Lincoln themes between the covers of Eric Foner’s edited work. Like a smorgasbord arranged with four main-course entrees — The President, Emancipator, The Man, and Politics and Memory — readers can pick and choose their side dishes written by scholars comfortable in their particular and very familiar Lincoln milieu. James McPherson writes about Lincoln as Commander in Chief, Mark Neely Jr. once more tackles Lincoln and civil liberties, Harold Holzer waxes on Lincoln and the arts, Foner explores Lincoln and plans of potential African American colonization;, Manisha Sinha prods in the arena of Lincoln and his relationship with black abolitionists, Andrew Delbanco focuses on Lincoln’s written word, Richard Carwadine extols Lincoln’s religious proclivities and virtues, and Catherine Clinton gives us a glimpse of Lincoln’s upbringing as well as his immediate family. Of particular interest is Sean Wilentz’s essay delving into a topic which has only been heretofore explored lightly, Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy. While Henry Clay remained Lincoln’s true hero, Wilentz concedes that Jackson and his particular stand for Union in the wake of the 1832 Nullification Crisis also helped to shape Lincoln’s views regarding national unity. The Age of Jackson and the common man also played a defining role, according to Wilentz, as the young and ambitious Illinois politician began his way into the arena of politics during Jackson’s second term. Lincoln Prize winner James Oakes extends the thesis of his argument raised in The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of Anti-slavery America by examining the relationship between natural citizen and state rights in the context of mid-19th century African Americans. Oakes continues to profess that Lincoln’s seemingly inconsistent position on race was trumped by his personal growth as the Civil War deepened; but in this essay Oakes adds a dimension often overlooked within the context of 19th-century race politics — the rights of states vis-à-vis a national government and how that played out principally within Illinois and then later across the nation. In light of the recent election of Barack Obama to the presidency, David Blight’s stirring epilogue on Lincoln and memory casts a view concerning how the party of Lincoln has misused the memory of Lincoln to promote its agenda, most tellingly during the Reagan years and more recently by the George W. Bush administration and its subsequent War on Terror. Blight is harsh and takes no contemporary Republican prisoners. Abraham Lincoln’s life will always offer good grist for the nation’s intellectual mill and the combination of these essays lays a claim that not only have these scholars staked out their particular piece of Lincoln turf, but that Lincoln not only belongs to them, in some small measure, but to all of us as well. It will indeed be interesting to see whether future generations of Lincoln scholars and the nation writ large will make the same claims. Reviewer: James A. Percoco teaches U.S. and Applied History at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va. He is author of A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History and Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict in U.S. History. Percoco is a USA TODAY All-USA teacher and is an adjunct professor in the School of Education at American University where he serves as History Educator-in-Residence.
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