Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World

Abstract

Essay collections are notoriously difficult to review. Their strength for readers—diversity of voices and multiple points of analysis—is simultaneously a source of weakness for reviewers. Many essay collections are uneven in quality, unfocused, and maddeningly vague in purpose and scope. Our Lincoln avoids these pitfalls. The essays run the gamut of Abraham Lincoln–related subjects, from Andrew Delbanco and Richard Carwardine's essays examining his religious life to Catherine Clinton's discussion of Lincoln's family and its influence. But taken together all of the essays approach Lincoln from a perspective that might be called critical sympathy. To a greater or lesser extent the authors express a degree of admiration for Lincoln. Sean Wilentz is enamored of Lincoln's commitment to democracy in his essay on the relationship between Lincoln and Jacksonian politics, and James McPherson offers high praise for Lincoln's skills as commander in chief, pointing out that Lincoln “took a more active, hands-on part in shaping military strategy than presidents have done in most other wars” (p. 28). Essays by Harold Holzer and David Blight examining aspects of Lincoln, public art, and the national memory also generally paint Lincoln in a positive light, even while takingissue with what Blight identifies as the “myriad of appropriations, uses, inventions, and reinventions—thefts—of the sixteenth president's meaning and memory” over the decades following his death (p. 269).