Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World Michael Vorenberg Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. Edited by Eric Foner. New York: Norton, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-393-33705-1, 336 pp., paper, $16.95. In 1958, on the eve of the Abraham Lincoln sesquicentennial, Richard Nelson Current published The Lincoln Nobody Knows. Now, more than fifty years later, with the Lincoln bicentennial at an end, is there anyone left on earth who does not know Lincoln? Is there anything about Lincoln left unknown? During the two years of the bicentennial celebration, the world welcomed more than one hundred new books on the sixteenth president. Scores of national and international Lincoln conferences have been held. Old Lincoln plays have been revived; new ones have been staged. Lincoln reenactors have never been so flush. There is even talk—still?—of a Steven Spielberg movie about the man. It may be too early to predict which of the bicentennial's creations will have staying power, but almost certainly one is Our Lincoln, the essay collection edited by Eric Foner. As Foner notes in his preface, a distinction of this collection is that it is deeply informed by the rich scholarship of the past thirty years or so on the subjects that connect to Lincoln and his world. The result is a set of essays that contains not only some fresh looks at Lincoln but also some snapshots of the state of scholarship on such subjects as abolitionism, evangelicalism, race and slavery, political ideology, the Victorian-era family, and American memory. [End Page 184] Another distinction of the book is the high stature of the contributors, a Who's Who of experts in nineteenth-century American history, including David W. Blight, Richard Carwardine, Catherine Clinton, Andrew Delbanco, Harold Holzer, Mark E. Neely Jr., James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Foner himself. Some of the essays are essentially digests or segments of the authors' recent books on Lincoln. For example, McPherson's essay on the way Lincoln grew into his role as commander in chief and fused that position into the office of the presidency is explored in even greater detail in the author's prize-winning monograph, Tried by War (2008). Similarly, Wilentz's argument about the Jacksonian roots of Lincoln's political ideology is a component of his substantial study, The Rise of American Democracy (2005); Clinton's reflections on the significance of family to Lincoln—especially female family members—in the earliest and latest years of his life grow out of her biography, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009); and Foner's reconsideration of Lincoln's approach to colonizing African Americans offers a glance into his larger study, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010). Other essays in the collection offer information or analyses unavailable elsewhere. A few essays in this category stand out. One is by Andrew Delbanco, who argues convincingly that Lincoln's oratory, while drawing on the "sacramental language" of earlier times, deftly moved toward the modern era of the sound bite by adapting his speech to mass-circulated newspapers, a relatively new media form in the era. Like Delbanco, Harold Holzer is impressed with the way Lincoln adapted to new technologies, specifically photography, which he took advantage of to create and recreate his public image during his rise to national prominence. In Manisha Sinha's essay, Lincoln is far less the pioneer—at least when it comes to racial egalitarianism. Sinha reminds us of the crucial role white and black radical abolitionists played in pushing Lincoln toward "interracial democracy," although she neglects much recent, important scholarship in her odd claims that these reformers have been "largely forgotten in the history of emancipation" (196). More nuanced and better informed is James Oakes's treatment of Lincoln's attitudes toward African Americans. Previous Lincoln scholars have tended to clump civil rights into one category and debated among themselves which rights Lincoln did or did not envision African Americans possessing in the post-emancipation nation. Oakes instead asks readers to think of rights as nineteenth-century Americans tended to think of them—as "natural rights," "citizenship rights," or "states' rights" (rights regulated by a...