 |
Home | Search | Browse | About IPO | Staff | Links |
|
Home | Search | Browse | About IPO | Staff | Links |
|
Book Reviews Lincoln books from finest and newest By GABOR S. BORITT James M. McPherson. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 173 with endnotes and index. $17.95 (cloth). Mark E. Neely Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 278 with endnotes and index. $24.95 (cloth). Elizabeth W. Matthews. Lincoln as a Lawyer: An Annotated Bibliography. With a Foreword by Cullom Davis. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. 248 with endnotes, bibliography and index. $29.95 (cloth). Albert F. Furtwangler. Assassin on Stage: Brutus, Hamlet and the Death of Lincoln. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Pp. 168 with end-notes and index. $23.95 (cloth). We have here a bouquet of lovely flowers for students of Abraham Lincoln. Two of the books under review come from two of the finest Lincoln scholars of this decade: James M. McPherson, Princeton don and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom (1988); and Mark E. Neely Jr., director of the Lincoln Museum at Fort Wayne, Ind., the best private depository of Lincoln materials in the world. The other two books under review come from fresh faces in the field: Elizabeth W. Matthews, librarian and professor at the Law School of Southern Illinois University; and Albert F. Furtwangler, a Canadian professor of English. 30/February 1992/Illinois Issues Together these four authors provide assurance that Lincoln studies continue on a vigorous and healthy course. This is significant to the health of the American nation because work on Lincoln, much more so than work on most other facets of history, has the opportunity to influence the culture as a whole. McPherson is probably the finest historian writing in America today. He has a first-rate mind and a beguiling yet crystal clear style of writing. Thanks to him some very good scholarship reaches a large literate general public. A democracy demands this from its best scholars, but very few can answer the call. McPherson does so, once again resoundingly, in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. A collection of lectures delivered during a 10-year period from 1982 to 1991, the volume can be sampled with much pleasure an essay at a time. Or it can be read as a book with a coherent theme that sees the Civil War as the second revolution in America with Lincoln playing an all important role in its direction and success.
This revolution changed the meaning of liberty in the United States, McPherson explains, from freedom from the power of the government to freedom of opportunity protected by the government. Lincoln led the American metamorphosis from negative to positive liberty with pragmatism, a willingness to embrace revolutionary change, a grand national strategy, inimitable use of the English language and unwavering determination. If a few short years after his death the momentum of change dissipated and a counterrevolution was born, important achievements of the Civil War endured. McPherson's Second American Revolution owes perhaps more to the leading American historian in the Progressive era, Charles Beard, than to Isaiah Berlin, the contemporary British philosopher of history. Scholars will debate McPherson's views of the Civil War and also the part assigned in it to Lincoln. That is all to the good. For now we have the Lincoln who exclaimed toward the end of his life, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me," and a McPherson who disagrees: "Lincoln was perhaps too modest." Mark E. Neely's The Fate of Liberty makes for more difficult reading but is eminently worth the effort. By far the best book on the subject of civil liberties during the war, it is based principally on research in the records of many thousands of arrested civilians. The result is masterful "constitutional history from the bottom up." Neely shows that the specter of Lincoln the "dictator" was a Democratic political creation and conversely that the Republican administration as a rule did not arrest people on narrow political grounds. Legitimate military needs led to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and to the military arrests as well as trials of civilians. Perhaps in the name of judicious academic impartiality, however, the book fails to give full credit to a government which did not stifle political opposition during the Civil War. Much liberty flourished in the North at the time of America's most dangerous moment. Lincoln's down-to-earth policies provide good guidance for possible future times of trouble. The most exciting Lincoln research underway today is "The Lincoln Legal Papers" project. When completed, it will put before the public a full record of the Illinois lawyer's legal career, perhaps 50,000 documents in all. It is interesting to speculate how this massive undertaking will revise our picture of Lincoln. As part of the project, Elizabeth W. Matthews created a 500-item annotated bibliography of the secondary literature about Lincoln as a lawyer. She includes books, journal articles, pamphlets, significant portions of monographs, even general works that touch on lawyer Lincoln. One could quibble only over the selections in the last category. Matthews' thorough research and judicious annotation make the book an indispensable reference tool for all serious students of Lincoln. Of the four books under consideration here only Albert R Furtwangler's Assassin on Stage does not focus on Lincoln. Nonetheless, the study provides a fascinating look at John Wilkes Booth, who played on stage the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar; Edwin Booth, whose greatest role was Hamlet; and their connections to Lincoln's death. Both Shakespearean tragedies can be seen as meditations on tyrannicide. And John Wilkes Booth, who deeply identified with Brutus, can be seen as a man whose "every step toward the back of Lincoln's head had been rehearsed already twenty centuries before he took it, and brilliantly dramatized in the Shakespearean tradition...." These lines provide a hint of the intellectual beauty of this complex book. Many sharply critical questions can be asked about it, and students of Lincoln dubious about American Studies, literary analysis and psychohistory — mundane souls in general — will not enjoy Furtwangler's writing. But a true treat awaits the venturesome. Gabor S. Boritt is Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies, director of the Civil War Institute and chairman of the board of the Lincoln Prize at Gettysburg College. His newest book, Why the Confederacy Lost, edited for Oxford University Press, will be published this spring.
February 1992/Illinois Issues/31 |
|
|