Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. By Howard Jones. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 236. $29.95.) Howard Jones's Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom is a welcome addition to a historiography that has focused mostly on the Civil War's domestic aspects. Jones seeks to balance out that domestic focus by examining the Union's wartime diplomacy, specifically the way Abraham Lincoln came to use emancipation as a tool for preventing foreign intervention in the war. In so doing, he skillfully highlights the intertwining of domestic and foreign policies and produces a volume that will benefit historians of both the Civil War and U.S. foreign relations. As Jones notes, the central diplomatic question during the Civil War was whether the Confederacy would win foreign recognition. British and/or French recognition would have had dangerous, if not fatal, consequences for Lincoln's effort to preserve the Union, and he sought to prevent such recognition at almost all costs. Not surprisingly, his efforts to prevent foreign intervention through appeals to the sanctity of the Union held no sway in other countries. Forced, then, to seek other strategies, the president ultimately hit on the idea of using emancipation to forestall the possibility of foreign intervention. A statement of presidential intent to free the nation's slaves would clear the ideological waters and proclaim in no uncertain terms Lincoln's determination that the United States join the world anti-slavery effort. And in the process it would deter both British and French intervention—the former by making plain the Union's antislavery agenda, the latter by removing a key support beam, the slave-holding South, for the new French empire in North America. The Emancipation Proclamation , Jones asserts, thereby struck a blow to foreign intervention in the Civil War and guaranteed a Union victory. But Jones sees Lincoln's poUcy of emancipation as more than simply a way to prevent foreign intervention. As he makes clear, Lincoln also believed that emancipation would make the United States a better nation. By giving truth to the country's supposed endorsement of individual liberty, emancipation would bring it closer to the ideal envisioned by the Founding Fathers. For Lincoln, such a nation lived up to its ideals not only in word but also in action. Thus, for him there was ultimately no way of preserving the Union without eliminating 154CIVIL WAR HISTORY slavery. Liberty and Union were for him, as they had been for Daniel Webster before him, one and inseparable. Jones demonstrates an excellent command of the relevant primary and secondary sources, and although he has written primarily a history of U.S. foreign relations, his treatment of British and French policy is nuanced and highly perceptive . Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth ofFreedom provides a great service to other historians by painting in bold relief the Unkages between Lincoln's domestic and foreign thinking. Mary Ann Heiss Kent State University Lincoln on Lincoln. Selected and edited by Paul M. ZaIl. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Pp. xiii, 198. $25.00.) Since Abraham Lincoln did not live to write his memoirs, Paul M. ZaIl has performed the task for him by gathering up fragments of self-description from Lincoln's letters and speeches and stitching them together with a series of notes to form a brief pseudo-autobiography. The result is a clever volume, but one that students of Lincoln will find more entertaining than enlightening. For those already familiar with the details of Lincoln's life, the book quickly becomes a sort of parlor game of trying to identify the sources of the various passages without turning to the endnotes. Zall's editorial notes provide some basic context and an occasional flash of insight, as when he quotes Weems's Life ofWashington (which Lincoln read as a child), describing the approach to Trenton in 1776: "The object before them was too vast to allow one thought about difficulties" (13). How long did that phrase lie fallow in Lincoln's mind until his 1862 letter to Cuthbert Bullitt: "What I deal with...