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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War
by Howard Jones.
Illustrated, notes, bibliographical essay, 191 pp., 1999. University of Nebraska Press, 233 North 8th St., Lincoln, NE 68588-0255, $29.95 plus shipping.
It is not quite true, as Howard Jones claims at the opening of Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War, that "no one has fully examined" the impact of Abraham Lincoln "on Civil War diplomacy." One of the greatest monographs in the Lincoln literature, Jay Monaghan’s A Dip-lomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs, was devoted to Lincoln’s role as a shaper of foreign policy, and Glyn-don Van Deusen, Brian Jenkins, Frank L. Owsley, Norman Ferris, and Jones himself have all, over the years, made major contributions to the study of Civil War diplomacy in which Lincoln plays a large role. What is true, though, is that Jones’s book straddles both sides of the dip-lomatic divide — American and European — and makes a major case for the centrality of slavery as an issue in Civil War diplomacy. Jones has a powerful and unsettling argument to make. For Jones, Lin-coln is clearly the major shaper of American foreign policy, and slavery is the principal issue around which that policy is formed — not around the blockade, not the Trent seizures, not the Alabama. But Lincoln had to con-tend with foreign governments — principally France and Great Britain — for whom slavery was also the principal issue, but in very different ways. So long as Lincoln kept emancipation off the list of war aims (as he did in 1861-1862), the British saw no necessity for intervention and were quite content to wait out the results of the war. They were not sympathetic to Lincoln’s handling of it. Many policy makers in Great Britain condemned the North for waging a needlessly bloody and incompetent war; others feared that such a stalemated war might lead to slave uprisings in the South (reminiscent of those the British had experienced in India only five years before) which would com-pletely destabilize the North American economies and politics. This made them even more critical of Lincoln’s turn to emancipation in 1862, since both the British and French read the Proclamation as a reckless incitement to slave insurrection. Like Brian Jenkins, Jones suspects that the Proclamation actually heightened the risk of foreign intervention (to stave off a race war) rather than dampening it. "Emancipation," Jones writes, "took on the appearance overseas of a maniacal effort to incite a slave insurrection conducive to a race war and now emerged, almost paradoxically, as an essential element in the European powers’ deliberations for a direct involvement." What stopped this rush to intervention in its tracks was pure pragma-tism. Britain’s War Secretary, Sir George Lewis, insisted that intervention was far too expensive to undertake; and in December 1862, British work-ers’ rallies in support of the North forced members of Parliament to con-sider what electoral risks they were running by supporting intervention. This created just enough of a hesitation for two American events to throw more damper onto intervention. First, the Lincoln administration survived the fall, 1862, congressional elections without losing its Repub-lican majority; and then, once the Proclamation became law on Jan. 1, 1863, no dreaded black uprising occurred. Enthusiasm for intervention gradually drained away in both France and Great Britain, and by the begin-ning of 1864, all hope of foreign help for the Confederacy was dead. There is nothing inherently novel in the notion that slavery played a ma-jor role in making up diplomatic minds in 1861-63. What is novel, how-ever, is Jones’s careful mining of foreign (and not just State Department) sources and archives, and his creative alertness to the twists and turns of a story that was much more complicated than we have imagined. It has been assumed, and for far too long, that emancipation ended all real likelihood of foreign intervention. Jones turns this on its head, and makes it clear that emancipation actually made that intervention more of a possibility. That — and Jones does not mind drawing this conclusion — throws Lincoln’s decision to free the slaves into a far more noble light, since emancipation ceases to be merely a diplomatic tub thrown to the whale. That this light should come from such an unexpected corner — di-plomacy — only makes Jones’s achievement more interesting.
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern College, St. Davids, Pa. He is author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and The Crisis of the American Republic: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (1995) .
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