Revisiting Lincoln and Emancipation

Abstract

Revisiting Lincoln and Emancipation Amy Murrell Taylor (bio) Richard Striner. Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 295 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00. The pendulum continues to swing back and forth on the subject of Abraham Lincoln, his leadership, and especially, his role as an emancipator of slaves. Long held up as a "Great Emancipator," the former president came under fire in the 1950s and '60s by historians such as Richard Hofstadter, who concluded that Lincoln's slavery policies were characterized more by reluctance than a zealous pursuit of abolition, and that the president himself was more of a moderate than a radical on the subject of emancipation. Since that time scholarly opinion has swung between these two poles, with works by LaWanda Cox, James M. McPherson, and Harry Jaffa testifying to the president's leadership in ending slavery, while other works by Barbara Fields, David Donald, and the editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project position the president more passively as a moderate. None have offered the final word on our most written-about president, according to Richard Striner in Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery, who defiantly sets out to rip the pendulum from its moorings and resolve this debate by reclaiming Lincoln's title as an emancipator. "Father Abraham," he argues, was a "masterful anti-slavery leader" who deserves historical acclaim for his consistently radical stance as an antislavery leader (p. 1).1 Striner is frustrated with the "Lincoln the moderate" school of historians. Those who minimize Lincoln's fervent adherence to emancipation have misunderstood Lincoln and his character, he argues. They have failed to see that Lincoln's politics depended on "some very crafty methods," methods that sometimes made him look like a reluctant abolitionist, or even a white supremacist, when really he was neither (p. 2). "Lincoln was that rarest of all great men," Striner writes with characteristic reverence, "a political ethicist who was also an extraordinary natural genius in the Machiavellian orchestration of power" (p. 10). When Lincoln uttered racist statements, or appeared to drag his feet on the subject of emancipation, he did so only to pander to the white supremacist element in the northern and border-state population, [End Page 461] something that any successful politician in the nineteenth century had to do. His statements were often deliberate ploys—tactical untruths—intended to keep that troublesome population behind him in the war, Striner argues, making the president a master of what we today might call political spin. By this reasoning, we cannot take Lincoln's statements at face value, something Striner believes the moderation camp is guilty of, but instead must parse the president's words with a level of scrutiny akin to literary analysis. Having examined a large collection of Lincoln's public and private writings from the beginning of his political career to his death, Striner urges readers to see Lincoln as an emancipationist first and a Unionist second—a 180-degree reversal of the moderation thesis. Yes, preserving the Union was a central part of Lincoln's war goals, Striner writes, but this was an "empty concept" to the president unless the Union first rededicated itself "to its founding principle that all men are created equal" (p. 7). Lincoln's unionism was founded on the very principle of equality, and, by extension, antislavery; ending slavery came first in his mind, and when that stance triggered secession, "then the fight to save the Union was added" to the president's priorities (p. 164). Striner's argument is indebted to a number of scholarly Lincoln studies—and he is careful to credit these along the way—including, most recently, Allen Guelzo's award-winning Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (2004). But where Guelzo emphasizes Lincoln's prudence in the pursuit of emancipation from the start of the war, Striner sees a more zealous and constant fight for equality throughout Lincoln's political career. Striner's may be one of the most spirited portrayals of Lincoln and slavery yet to have hit our shelves. Striner begins decades before the war and focuses readers' attention on evidence of Lincoln's early...