Great Emancipator Research Articles

Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln

Black American’s attitudes toward the Great Emancipator is the focus of Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press), edited by Fred Lee Hord and Matthew D. Norman. The essays show that African Americans’ attitudes toward Lincoln “plumb deeper than his reputation as the Great Emancipator,” writes Morel. Indeed, African Americans; attitudes toward Lincoln from his presidency to the recent past evince a “’persistent ambivalence,’” write Hord and Norman in their introduction. Morel believes that “the value of a book about Black American opinions of Lincoln resides not only in the neglected history it tells, but also the possibility it can rejuvenate a discussion of what an excluded people saw worth saving in the Great Emancipator and the nation he thought worthy of the saving.”

Serbian Women’s Movement in Austria-Hungary from the Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries: Ideology, Organisations, and Leaders

This article explores the development of feminist ideology and the formation of the Serbian women’s movement in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emergence of the movement can be explained by the views put forward by the leaders of the Serbian political youth group Omladina, who outlined the role of women in nation-building processes, as well as in the formation of Serbian identity and the achievement of sovereignty in particular. The leaders of the socialist and liberal movements used the principal Serbian female images — assistants and mothers — for ethno-political mobilization. The image of the mother was of major importance for preserving a Serbian identity under the Habsburg rule, in the face of the threat of assimilation after the Compromise of 1867. The participation of women in solving national problems and their social importance led to the dissemination of feminist thinking and the subsequent emergence of the women’s movement. The article suggests that Draga Dejanović (1840–1871) and Milica Tomić (1859–1944) played an important role in this development. It was in the early 1870s that Dejanović advocated equal access to secondary and higher education and developed the idea of “enlightened motherhood”, which encouraged liberal figures of the national movement to defend the interests of women. In addition, mono-ethnic women’s groups pursuing humanism and education were established, providing women from privileged social strata with culturally acceptable means of participation in the public life of the Serbian community in Austria-Hungary. The Serbian women’s movement had undergone a significant ideological evolution perpetuated by the magazine Žena (“Woman”) and its editor-in-chief Milica Tomić. The article suggests that Milica Tomić initiated a realignment of the movement away from purely national goals and towards greater emancipation both on a social and a legal scale.

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House by Jonathan W. White

Reviewed by: A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House by Jonathan W. White Christopher Thrasher A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House. By Jonathan W. White. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022. Pp. xxii, 249. $26.00, ISBN 978-1-5381-6180-7.) A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House by Jonathan W. White analyzes what an unprecedented wave of African American visitors to the White House during the Abraham Lincoln administration meant to the people of the nineteenth century and what those visits might mean to the people of the present. White is well qualified to write this book. In 2008, he received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. He currently serves as an associate professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University. White's previous books include the award-winning Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, 2014) and Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2017). A House Built by Slaves begins in the present, with a preface focused on modern debates about Lincoln's legacy. This preface helps White demonstrate this topic's contemporary relevance. To provide context for Lincoln as a person, White spends chapter 1 covering Lincoln's pre-presidential interactions with African Americans. The next fifteen chapters provide stories and quotations from many of the African Americans who visited the Lincoln White House. The book's last chapter covers responses to Lincoln's death and documents how African Americans mourned him. The work's epilogue explores immediate postwar perceptions of Lincoln. The book concludes with an appendix that mentions several unconfirmed meetings between Lincoln and African Americans. White interspaces the book's seventeen chapters with six interludes that provide helpful context for the primary narrative. His use of these interludes is an odd stylistic choice, but one that works well for this story. This book provides an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War, Lincoln's presidency, and continuing debates about race in America. Long hailed as the great emancipator, Lincoln has been attacked by critics in [End Page 782] recent years, particularly for his treatment of African Americans. In response to these critics, White provides a powerful and well-researched defense of Abraham Lincoln. White argues, "When Lincoln met with African Americans—whether enslaved or free—he treated them with dignity and respect" (p. xiii). To prove his point, White uses extensive quotations from African Americans who visited the White House to demonstrate that while Lincoln was not perfect, he was a friend to slaves and a powerful advocate for racial progress. In the words of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln was "emphatically the black man's president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men" (p. 193). The book's research and writing are both very good. The work rests on a solid foundation of sources, including archival collections, published primary sources, and secondary literature. The writing is easy to read and free of obscure jargon. White wisely includes pictures of many of the African Americans highlighted in the book, which helps humanize the topic. The book's 206 pages of text are both sufficient to cover the subject and brief enough to remain accessible to casual readers. Overall, A House Built by Slaves is an excellent book. It is well written and well researched, and it provides an important contribution to the scholarship. The excellent research will offer seasoned historians new insights into Lincoln and his legacy. The book's conversational tone, carefully selected illustrations, and reasonable length make it a great option for casual readers or for use in undergraduate history courses. Christopher Thrasher National Park College Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks by Emily L. Moore (review)

Reviewed by: Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks by Emily L. Moore John R. Legg (bio) Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks by Emily L. Moore University of Washington Press, 2019 HOW DID SIX TOTEM POLE PARKS come to be in southeast Alaska during and after the New Deal era? In precise detail, Emily L. Moore's masterfully written study, Proud Raven, Panting Wolf, answers this question. Planned during the years of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and developed between 1938 and 1942, six totem pole parks (also known as "crest poles") were constructed on the traditional homelands of the Tlingit and Haida people, and in many cases, reworked by the very Indigenous people who had previously been barred from practicing these culturally important ceremonies of constructing and carving totem poles. These Indigenous communities held the poles in sacred regard, as Moore describes, as the poles ranged in meaning: some represented mortuary poles and some told "stories of clan history of origins of world phenomena," while others visualized influential people or the public shaming of others in their home community (6). The story of their re-creation during the New Deal era comes from America's quest to build tourism in Alaska and redefine an "American heritage." Overall, Moore's book shows us the binary of American visions of the authentic performance of indigeneity. At the same time, Indigenous people used this moment of negotiation and redevelopment to deploy their sovereignty. Through eight chapters, Moore tells a story ranging from the thought process of engineering these parks to boost American tourism to the lasting legacy the parks have today. Chapter 1, "Archival Claims," demonstrates how non-Native peoples viewed the totem poles as relics of the past even though Tlingit and Haida people actively used the poles to recount clan histories and stories. Chapter 2, "Exacting Copies," shows how the U.S. Forest Service's decision to develop exact replicas of the totem poles clashed with how Indigenous people perceived the process and meaning of their construction. In "French and English Totems," chapter 3, Moore recounts how Linne A. Forrest Sr., the architect of the U.S. Forest Service, imagined the totem parks through the lens of French and English parks; a jarring vision that differed from Indigenous perceptions of their homelands. Chapters 4 and 5 look at specific totem poles and their carvers to explore how Indigenous carving skills challenged federal expectations that the poles look similar. Chapter 5 [End Page 169] offers a unique story of the "Lincoln Pole," a totem pole that visually looks like President Abraham Lincoln but represents the region's first white settler. This book's point could have offered more profound insights into the perception of Lincoln as the "Great Emancipator," which is antithetical to his relationship with Indigenous people. Chapter 6 explores the rise of American tourism in the parks and the presentation of totem poles to the American public. On the flip side of chapter 6's exploration, Moore writes in chapter 7 about Indigenous carvers who sought to make money after the CCC ended the totem pole restoration project. Moore finishes the book with a story of the 1940 Wrangell Potlatch commemorative celebration of the totem park on Shakes Island (in chapter 8) and an epilogue that describes the enduring legacy of these totem pole parks to Tlingit and Haida people today. The narrative arc centers on how Indigenous people perceived, produced, and preserved these totem poles as culturally significant monuments, and in so doing, reinforced their claims of sovereignty and self-determination. As a resource for those interested in Native American and Indigenous studies, Moore's book centers Indigenous voices and perspectives surrounding the totem pole parks. By using their perspective and reading against the grain of colonial-produced documents, Proud Raven, Panting Wolf shows the ways in which Indigenous people actively worked to preserve their cultures and survive colonial expansion onto their lands. In this regard, Moore's book would pair well with two similar works: with Jean Dennison's Colonial Entanglement (2012) to show how deeply entrenched settler colonialism works inside Indigenous communities and with Cathleen Cahill...

EDUCATION TOWARDS LITERACY AND DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP OF YOUNG PEOPLE: BEYOND BEING ONLINE

The effects of the pandemic crises in education have revealed social inequalities in the youth field but have also provided an opportunity to rethink the demands of education in an increasingly digital world. Framed on youth policies and on the 3 areas of Digital Citizenship defined by the Council of Europe – being online, well-being online and rights online ­– the present study explores policies and practices in youth digital literacy and citizenship education, with the aim of answering the following questions: What are the strands of digital citizenship education? How do teachers and school leaders perceive practices regarding young people and media and information literacy? What are the main challenges of digitalisation regarding social justice for young people facing vulnerable situations? Data were collected by a questionnaire submitted in 2020 to 120 teachers and school leaders from Portugal, Bulgaria, and Turkey, complemented by documental analysis. The results allow identifying the main strands of digital citizenship in education and the challenges of digital citizenship education. Despite the tendency of policies and European projects towards greater emancipation and empowerment of young people, the teachers and school leaders described practices that have aspects of a more regulatory nature. The conclusions supported the proposal of a model based on a critical approach with the aim of sustaining more inclusive and emancipatory digital practices, which favour greater conditions of social justice.

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780–1829

While most contemporary audiences and readers associate British monarch George III with Lin Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, particularly the king’s show-stopping “You’ll Be Back,” few would connect Harold Pinter to the Abominable Question of Catholic Emancipation. Thanks to Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, and perhaps this review, however, they are now linked. It would appear that the constituencies in the battle for religious freedom from 1780 to 1829 would have nothing to do with the middle-class characters inhabiting Pinter’s plays, but a quick read of Fraser’s book shows that fashion may be the only difference between Pinter’s cast of thugs, criminals, politicos, and pugilists and the eighteenth-century British monarchy. At the heart of both authors’ work is power, and both use their razor-sharp wit to skewer the overinflated.Like Pinter’s, Fraser’s canon is multifaceted and substantial: fourteen historical nonfiction works, including two memoirs, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter and My History: A Memoir of Growing Up. Her most famous historicals feature women: The Weaker Vessel: Women’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England, The Warrior Queens, The Wives of Henry VIII, and Marie Antoinette: The Journey, which was later made into a film directed by Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst. Her Jemima Shore mysteries were also the basis of two successful television series.A convert to Catholicism at the age of fourteen, Fraser admits that since that time, she has had a “lifelong fascination with Catholic history” (xi). Judging from Our Israeli Diary, 1978, which documents her trip with Pinter, Pinter did not. It is comical to read of Fraser’s delight in all things religious, while Pinter’s response is always one of polite disinterest.According to Fraser, The King and the Catholics continues the work she began in Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. And both address an issue she says is “timeless: the rights of people to practice their own religion” (xi). And just a few examples from the book support her claim. She begins with the Gordon Riots, which resulted in over one thousand dead and destruction to the city “that would not be surpassed until the Blitz in the Second World War” (1). Led by Lord George Gordon, the unrest was a response to the Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics the right to buy land, removed the persecution of priests, and permitted Catholic schools. While the act also required Catholics to take an oath of allegiance, Gordon and others thought the concession did nothing to alleviate the real threat of Catholic religious freedom—the threat of foreign political interference, or worse, from the Vatican. Fraser is quick to note, too, that the Catholics were far from innocent. She reminds us of their bloody deeds, treachery, and attempts to overthrow governments, and almost anticipating the pandemic, she includes the mention of an anti-vaxxer pope, Leo XII (132).Clearly, ignorance fueled much of the hostility. Religious differences were often just an excuse to riot: “the mere word ‘Popery’ was in fact inflammatory,” but many did not know, quoting Daniel Defoe, “whether it be a man or a horse” (3). To connect the eighteenth century to contemporary times further, during an 1826 election in Waterford, the loser, George Beresford, who argued that Catholics should be grateful to their aristocratic “natural protectors,” contested the election in a manner similar to America’s forty-fifth president (162–63). The election, by the way, was won by the behind-the-scenes work of the great emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, a Protestant sympathetic to Catholic Emancipation and who persuaded the notoriously rowdy pork butchers of Waterford to “take the pledge” and not drink until the election was won (163), in this case by a Protestant sympathetic to Catholic Emancipation.The book is filled with entertaining details about affairs, sins, missteps, waffling, politics, deals, crimes, bodily functions, and savageries, all the best bits that make British history so addictive. A friend who also read the book said, “How does Fraser find these details?” Perhaps it is her experience writing detective fiction, which certainly helps in this book. Though we all know the ending, Fraser’s artistry makes the final stages of this battle over religious freedom exciting, suspenseful, and relevant. More importantly, as an outspoken critic against the misuses of power through her political activism and her body of work, Fraser reminds us that such battles are, unfortunately, timeless, and the defense of such freedoms necessary no matter what the era.

Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs

Reviewed by: Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs LeeAnna Keith Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War. By Cody Marrs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 226. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-3665-4.) Cody Marrs serves up a feast of Civil War stories in his timely, compact, and entertaining new analysis, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the [End Page 528] Civil War. The book identifies four narratives, or "plots," that have recurred continually in literature and public remembrances of the American Civil War: "A Family Squabble," "A Dark and Cruel War," "The Lost Cause," and "The Great Emancipation." Considering a long range of history—from war's end to the sharp edge of the present—and taking a wonderfully broad set of texts and manifestations into account, Not Even Past presents the Civil War as "an unsettled conflict that will continue to be refought as long as American civilization exists" (p. 10). The "lack of an ending fuel[ed] these plots," Marrs argues, calling the Civil War the source of "unaccomplished, and perhaps unaccomplishable," goals (pp. 8, 171). Marrs's history unfolds in the world of belles lettres, the visual arts, films, maps, statuary, published alternative histories, television, and children's literature, although street demonstrations such as Bree Newsome's removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse in 2015 and recent incidents of white supremacist violence are also included. The canon of Civil War and American literature favorites receives full consideration here, as evoked by the title's use of William Faulkner's quotable assessment that in the South, "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Requiem for a Nun [1951]). Indeed, the book holds a special appeal for genealogists, self-identifying southerners, and other Civil War aficionados, whose familiarity with the texts creates a rich synergy. This frisson is especially available to white readers who are Generation X and older—old enough to have experienced Roots (1976) and Gone With the Wind (1939) without considering the context, but now educated in the critical perspectives that Not Even Past brings to bear. Alongside the establishment Marrs showcases Black and previously marginalized nineteenth-century voices such as memoirists William Wells Brown and Elizabeth Keckley and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. He develops W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) as a key text in the theme of Great Emancipation, the source of the most binding commentary about the idea that the war would not be complete until all barriers between classes and races had been overcome, and he finds echoes of that argument in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Natasha Trethewey. The book's narratives also draw out the shades of those whose retrograde ideas caused them to be forgotten or banished from the canon: Jefferson Davis as memoirist; the novelists Thomas Dixon Jr. and Margaret Mitchell; and the writer Shelby Foote. Best of all in some passages, Marrs finds Civil War mainstays in offbeat and niche expressions: among the wrongheaded Literary Agrarians, for example, and in alternative and science fiction accounts in which Confederates did not lose the Civil War but abolished slavery anyway, fulfilling some contemporary Lost Cause fantasies. In a scene that was too perfect to omit, Marrs describes a character embedded in a fictional inversion of U.S. history after the war who finds a "true" counterfactual history that showed the Union as the victor. Because the Civil War is not even past, Marrs finds cause to consider the lessons of his plots and memes for the turbulent present. Literature "aids us in creating stories for the world to come and figuring out how to live within it," he argues, envisioning a dawning equality when "the Civil War will finally come to a close and another story will emerge" (pp. 183, 185). [End Page 529] LeeAnna Keith Collegiate School, New York City Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

Women in Organized Crime

The involvement of women in organized criminal activities such as street gangs, mafias, and illegal transnational markets, including human trafficking, human smuggling, and drug trafficking, is an important but understudied subject. Gendered studies and feminist theories can improve current knowledge and provide important new insights. They can enhance understanding of women’s roles, behavior, motivations, and life stories in all forms of organized crime and challenge traditional and established ideas about victims, perpetrators, violence, and agency. Women, in all those settings, occupy both passive, subordinate roles and more active, powerful ones. However, ideas that greater emancipation, labor force participation, and formal equality of women in our time have fundamentally affected women’s involvement in organized crime have not been validated. Borders between victims and perpetrators are often blurred. More research is needed on the effects of globalization and technological change, on the salience of conceptions of masculinity in relation to organized crime, and on conceptualization of violence in women’s personal lives and criminal actions.

Lincoln and the Abolitionists by Stanley Harrold

Reviewed by: Lincoln and the Abolitionistsby Stanley Harrold Erik J. Chaput Lincoln and the Abolitionists. By Stanley Harrold. Concise Lincoln Library. ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 155. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8093-3641-8.) The editors of the Southern Illinois University Press series on Abraham Lincoln have assembled an impressive array of historians to write short volumes focusing on varying aspects of the life of the "Great Emancipator" and the Civil War era. To cover the all-important ground of Lincoln's complex relationship with abolitionists, the editors wisely selected Stanley Harrold, one of the leading authorities on the most important reform movement in early America. According to Harrold, the relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists centered on the latter's efforts to "push" the president "toward their goal" of universal and immediate emancipation (p. 75). As Harrold notes, many abolitionists had a conflicted relationship of "admiration and doubt" with Lincoln during the Civil War years (p. 93). With the clear, concise prose and careful eye for detail that have been trademarks of his long and distinguished career, Harrold skillfully narrates how Lincoln's views concerning abolitionism and antislavery politics developed from the conservative positions he adopted from his hero Henry Clay (gradual emancipation coupled with colonization), to the more liberal and expansive positions put forth by William Lloyd Garrison (immediate [End Page 694]emancipation with basic rights of citizenship). However, Lincoln's rise to political power, as Harrold notes, was inextricably tied to partisan maneuvering and an unwavering conception of party loyalty, something that, more often than not, led Lincoln to shy away from the radical fringe of the American political order. Lincoln was not immune to the use of race-baiting in the political arena, as Harrold makes clear in a discussion of Lincoln's attacks on Martin Van Buren in 1840. During the war, however, abolitionist arguments began to influence Lincoln. The book does not shed much new light on Lincoln's political career, but Harrold's account of the positions espoused by the numerous factions within the abolitionist movement and how various individuals reacted to Lincoln's speeches and policy positions will be of interest to even the most veteran student. Whereas some writers fall into the trap of painting abolitionists as a monolithic group, Harrold provides details on four distinct wings of the movement, bringing into his narrative a wide cast of characters. Included in the discussion are the colorful and outspoken Parker Pillsbury and Stephen S. Foster, who never let up in their criticism of Lincoln, along with the prolific author and editor William Goodell. Harrold's treatment of abolitionists Ichabod Codding, Zebina Eastman, and Owen Lovejoy, the founders of the Republican Party in Illinois, will be of interest to scholars. The same is true of the efforts of Radical Republicans in early 1862 to bring leading abolitionists to the nation's capital to take part in a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institution. The final third of the book covers Lincoln's years in the Executive Mansion and the reactions of abolitionists to his policies and stated positions. One notable omission here, however, is a discussion of Lincoln's interactions with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. In the end, in the wake of his tragic assassination, the majority of abolitionists found much to admire in Lincoln. In a speech at City Hall in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 1, 1865, Garrison heaped praise on Lincoln, the politician who had steered the ship of state through the complex waters of antislavery politics. Harrold's book captures this story well. Erik J. Chaput The Lawrenceville School Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Art of Persuasion

ABSTRACTFrederick Douglass was a master rhetorician who regularly told stories about his life history. Those stories changed, depending on the rhetorical occasion. This article examines his various accounts of Abraham Lincoln over an approximately 30-year period. At times Douglass presents Lincoln as the Great Emancipator; at other times he presents him as a racist. Douglass is interested less in documenting the historical truth about Lincoln than in using him to make arguments for racial justice.

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy Erik J. Chaput (bio) Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. New York: Viking, 2017. 496 pp. Bibliography and Index. $35.00. Allen C. Guelzo. Redeeming the Great Emancipator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 208 pp. Index. $22.95. Though it was clear that Abraham Lincoln continued to struggle to define exactly what emancipation would mean for the slave, in his December 1862 annual message the president informed Congress that the civil war that had already claimed the lives of thousands of men was being fought to ensure that the American democratic experiment would endure. According to Lincoln, the United States was "the last best, hope of earth" for democracy. As historian Sean Wilentz has noted, "given the blows dealt to democratic governments in the Old World, it was easy enough for Lincoln and others to see America as a singular and even providential nation."1 The protection and promotion of a government by and for the people was as important to Lincoln as saving the Union and ending slavery. However, unlike John Adams or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln never put forth a detailed blueprint for how the tenets of democracy and republican government were to be structured. He was not an original policy thinker in that regard. He simply but forcibly maintained that slavery and democracy were incompatible, and the "fiery trial" of the war would eventually lead to a polity in which all men would be equal to one another. His job, as he had noted in the secession winter, was to protect the words "fitly spoken" in Jefferson's Declaration. Historians of the Civil War era, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Edward Ayers, generally give Lincoln high marks for his steadfast commitment to preserving a conception of democracy predicated on human equality. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, however, believes that historians need to adopt a more balanced and holistic approach to the study of the Lincoln presidency and how "Lincoln's republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people" (p. 3). Pryor portrays a president whose vision [End Page 65] of democracy was limited and who repeatedly missed opportunities to aid not only the cause of freedom for black Americans, but also for women and Native Americans. Pryor, who was tragically killed just before her latest book went to press, is not afraid to attack the hallowed image of the sixteenth president. Lincoln's "saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion" (p. 9). Overall, Six Encounters with Lincoln is one of the harshest assessments of the Great Emancipator to appear in recent years. "What we must question," the author writes "is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country" (p. 8). Pryor, a prodigious researcher who examined hundreds of manuscript collections, paints a portrait of an embattled president, unsure of how to handle the pressures of office. Indeed, Pryor's harangue of Lincoln resembles a characterization Reverdy Johnson sketched for George McClellan at the height of the 1864 presidential campaign: His infirmity of purpose, his unsteadiness in any policy, his once expressed dislike to radicalism, his subsequent adoption of its worst features, his ignorant and mischievous interference with our military campaigns, his appointments, often against the advice of high military officers, of notorious incompetency—his frequent and nearly fatal changes of commanders.2 Pryor reconstructs six meetings Lincoln had during his presidency with figures who, while well known in some historical circles, are often not part of either biographical accounts or general narratives of the Civil War era. The author uses the "six encounters" with Lincoln in the White House in order to discuss the contours of American democracy, including civilian control of the military, civil liberties, the politics of emancipation, the fate of Native Americans, the role of women in the war, and the politics of reconstruction. Pryor curiously fails, however, early in the narrative to offer up an account of the ways in which Lincoln understood and used the word "democracy" in his political career, a...

Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook

Reviewed by: Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook Jennifer M. Murray Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865. By Robert J. Cook. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 273. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2349-4.) The current discourse about the place of Civil War symbols on the landscape of the United States has once again opened the vibrant, cacophonous chords of [End Page 1015] Civil War memory. Civil War scholars have explored these "'mystic chords of memory'" and America's contested narratives of the nation's most divisive event (p. 13). David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) has defined much of the historiographical conversation. Blight argues that Union and Confederate veterans willingly forgot the war's contested elements in order to promote sectional reconciliation. Recent scholars, including Caroline E. Janney and M. Keith Harris, have disputed Blight's thesis, suggesting a more contested process of reconciliation. Robert J. Cook's Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 offers the most recent attempt to explore Americans' memories of the nation's defining conflict. Whereas most scholars of Civil War memory focus on the war's veterans, Cook also considers Civil War memory in the twenty-first century, thereby showing the continued relevance of the Civil War in modern politics and culture. The first section of the book covers familiar terrain. Cook challenges Blight's reconciliation thesis, arguing that Union and Confederate veterans did not forget the war's divisive aspects. Instead, he maintains, the veterans "played an active role in the reconciliation process, but not through any desire to forget on their part" (p. 97). Veterans advanced reconciliation through a deliberate recognition that their foes fought courageously for their respective causes. The process of forgetting came from subsequent generations who expressed no interest in widening the sectional chasm. Cook credits Gilded Age writers and publishers for having a hand in shaping Civil War memory. Through important publications in Century, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and Annals of the War, readers were regaled with often-glorified tales of the war's soldiers and battles. The second half of the book, "The Modern Era," advances the conversation about memories of the Civil War into the twenty-first century. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the war's veterans, Cook explores how Americans have engaged with the war and molded it to suit contemporary political and social agendas. For example, World War II offered an opportunity for the federal government to use Abraham Lincoln and the rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address to foster patriotism. The Civil War centennial, in the midst of the civil rights movement, deepened sectional and racial discourse. Black activists had little interest in commemorating the Civil War. Indeed, Malcolm X discredited popular portrayals of Lincoln as the great emancipator. In the years after the Civil War centennial, the war received less attention, from both academics and popular audiences. Cook attributes this neglect to the "'post-heroic era'" when Americans "seemed to lose not only their faith in towering figures like Abraham Lincoln but also their psychological need for them" (p. 184). Americans in the twenty-first century continue to grapple with the Civil War's legacy. Barack Obama reenergized Lincoln's popularity through rhetorical appeal and by launching his presidential campaign on the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln had kicked off his senatorial race in 1858. The National Park Service's Civil War sesquicentennial theme of "Civil War to Civil Rights" offered an opportunity to explore racial accomplishments and the war's social and cultural legacies. Yet the overall public response to the war's 150th anniversary was anemic. [End Page 1016] Civil War Memories offers a comprehensive treatment of the memory of the nation's most enduring and contested event. In offering a study of Civil War memory since 1865, Cook underscores that memories of the war have never been monolithic. They have always been debated, politicized, and maligned. His attention to the war's differing memories...

Lincoln's Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days That Changed a Presidency, March 24–April 8, 1865 by Noah Andre Trudeau

Reviewed by: Lincoln's Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days That Changed a Presidency, March 24–April 8, 1865 by Noah Andre Trudeau Shannon Bontrager Lincoln's Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days That Changed a Presidency, March 24–April 8, 1865. By Noah Andre Trudeau. ( El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie, 2016. Pp. xiv, 337. $32.95, ISBN 978–1-61121–326-3.) Each generation of Americans turns Abraham Lincoln into anything they want him to be, including a Brown Republican, a forebearer of gay rights, a victim of depression, the Great Emancipator, a white supremacist, a vampire slayer, and, above all, a mythologized American hero. Noah Andre Trudeau's skillful telling of Lincoln's time at City Point, Virginia, during the last days of the Civil War continues modern scholars' tradition of making Lincoln speak to the present. Trudeau's innovative work contributes to a conversation that attempts to redeem Lincoln in the post industrial, globalized, post-postmodern digital age. If a great man could not disrupt the destiny of the nation, Trudeau seems to argue, collaboration between great men of the age could. According to Trudeau, Lincoln's journey with his family and entourage to City Point in late March 1865 was a key moment in the collaborative exchange between Lincoln, the political virtuoso, and General Ulysses S. Grant, the military master. Trudeau devotes a chapter to each of the sixteen days Lincoln spent on the journey, diligently weaving memoirs, personal accounts, newspaper stories, and archival materials into a compelling narrative. Indeed, rarely in American history has the commander in chief worked so closely with his generals overseeing operations in the field. Trudeau tells a richly detailed story of the secret discussions between Lincoln, Grant, and other Union generals, perceived affronts between Mary Todd Lincoln and Grant's wife, Julia Grant, and the stressful, simultaneous demands of Lincoln's acting as president, husband, and doting father all while the Union victory at Petersburg and the collapse of Richmond unfolded. Trudeau argues that Lincoln's temporary escape from Washington, D.C., transformed him from a melancholic wartime commander into a rejuvenated reconstruction leader with a vision for the postwar nation. The president's proximity to the battlefield allowed him to see up close the bloody nature of war, the joy of black freedpeople escaping bondage, and the absolute demoralization of white southerners who supported the losing cause, especially during his walking tour of Richmond on April 4, 1865. Outside Washington, Lincoln could think clearly and pity all. [End Page 176] Trudeau includes a welcome discussion of sources in the appendixes, the first of which is a "Sources Casebook" that provides a transparent conversation about what troubles him about the sources surrounding Lincoln's journey. Sometimes Trudeau has strong reasons for rejecting archival sources or agenda-laced eyewitness accounts, but other times his decision comes down to his critique of a source. Nevertheless, readers can decide whether they agree or disagree with the author's choices. Military historians and popular historians interested in reconstructed, behind-the-scenes political conversations and the Petersburg campaign will be thrilled with this book, as will those who seek to understand Lincoln as a model of teamwork and collaboration in management. Scholars and graduate students will welcome Trudeau's "Sources Case-book" and be interested in Lincoln's journey but may criticize how Trudeau has taken the sixteen-day trip out of the larger context of Lincoln's presidency and the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Trudeau's desire to understand the partnership between great men takes his attention away from the men in the trenches at Petersburg. Even as Trudeau describes Lincoln's visits to Richmond and to a military hospital, neither freedpeople nor soldiers are center stage. He also relies heavily on Lincoln's April 11, 1865, speech from the White House as evidence of Lincoln's full transformation into a postwar president, although the president certainly could not have anticipated the incredible complexities of Reconstruction. Furthermore, Trudeau suggests that Lincoln's time at City Point influenced President Grant's two-term administration, which he describes as "a determined effort (sadly, not always successful) to transform the nation along the lines Lincoln had chalked...

Abe Lincoln in the Age of Obama and Spielberg

Writing of Abe Lincoln after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass foreshadowed a natural divergence when evaluating the 16th president. ‘Viewed from the genuine abolitionist ground’, observed Douglass, ‘Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country … he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined’. Douglass himself concluded that ‘Great Emancipator’ had largely failed to imagine anything approaching a biracial America, remaining ‘pre-eminently the white man’s President’. Taking their cue from Douglass, scholars in our own time have largely concurred. A central tenet of Civil War history since the 1950s has revolved around the notion of a great chasm dividing the ‘dull and indifferent’ Lincoln from the zealous and idealistic abolitionists. Only recently, almost coterminous with the ascension of Barack Obama to American presidency, this divide seems to have shrunk and the evaluation of the radicals and the reformer president shown signs of what I call ‘convergence’. Prominent historians now view the radicals and the Republican leader more synoptically. Hollywood has reinforced the new Lincoln in the public eye. Stephen Spielberg has joined the scholars in giving us a Lincoln for the Age of Obama. How long this convergence view will last is open for debate, with the Trump era already reminding Americans that the stark divisions of the present suggest fundamental rifts in the past.

The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine

Reviewed by: The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine Manisha Sinha The Lives of Frederick Douglass. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-674-05581-0, 373 pp., cloth, $29.95 One of the foremost scholars of early African American literature, Robert S. Levine, has written a nuanced and careful analysis of Frederick Douglass's iconic autobiographies or, as he calls it, Douglass's many lives. The introduction, a survey of the historical literature and the publication histories of Douglass's autobiographies, is in itself worth the price of entrance. Levine not only delineates the content of these books, comparing them with Douglass's contemporaneous speeches and letters, but also frames his book around Douglass's relationship with pivotal figures of his times, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and his erstwhile master, Thomas Auld. The result is a book that explodes conventional wisdom on not just Douglass but also his fraught relationships with these men. In perhaps one of the most original chapters of the book, Levine argues that the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass's first autobiography, published in 1845, was the product of a close collaboration between Garrisonian abolitionists and Douglass. Dispensing with the tired argument that white abolitionists simply co-opted the stories of fugitive slaves, Levine reveals the manner in which Garrison's introduction resonates with themes in Douglass's narrative. He provocatively designates the narrative the "Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Narrative." Douglass was of course a star lecturing agent of the [End Page 206] society and, as Levine acknowledges, perfected the telling of his autobiography on the lecture circuit before he put pen to paper. Levine challenges Douglass's later claim that Garrisonians insisted that he only tell his story and restrict his analysis of slavery. But according to him, Douglass reclaimed his narrative when he published it in two editions in Ireland with the help of the Irish abolitionist Richard Webb. This argument may be overstated, considering that Webb, who ushered the Dublin editions of the Narrative into production, was a staunch Garrisonian and not very fond of Douglass. And most of the changes in the Narrative were designed to appeal to an English market, though clearly Douglass's tour abroad, as most of his biographers have noted, helped him to emerge as an independent abolitionist leader. Levine reads Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published after his rancorous break with Garrison, in light of his novella The Heroic Slave. The novella was based on the 1841 shipboard slave revolt on the Creole led by Madison Washington. Levine deftly illustrates how the figures of Washington and Douglass himself merge in his writings. This iteration of Douglass's life story, Levine contends, marks his emergence not only as a political abolitionist but also as one who discards Garrisonian moral suasion for a more resistant posture against slavery. But Garrison, as Levine also shows, never hesitated to justify slave resistance and rebellion, despite his formal commitment to nonviolence. While James McCune Smith's introduction to the new autobiography evokes black artistry and depicts Douglass as the representative black man, Douglass's effusive dedication to Gerrit Smith, which Levine reproduces, reveals that interracialism or building alliances with whites remains important for Douglass. It is somewhat surprising then that Levine does not examine Douglass's relationship with Smith, which John Stauffer sees as pivotal in his book The Black Hearts of Men. Levine's earlier volume on the relationship between Douglass and Martin Delany, the black emigrationist, is one of the best on the subject. Levine does spend considerable time on Douglass's relationship with two major white figures, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. He convincingly reveals that until the end of his life Douglass saw Brown and the abolitionists as more heroic figures than the Great Emancipator. Levine argues for Douglass's changing evaluations of Lincoln, from harsh critic to one who sought to use the mantle of Lincoln for the continuing struggle for black rights. Levine is particularly good at comparing Douglass's contemporary [End Page 207] criticisms of the president with his retrospective accounts of his meetings with Lincoln in...

Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Nation by Daniel W. Crofts

Reviewed by: Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Nation by Daniel W. Crofts Dwight T. Pitcaithley (bio) Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Nation. By Daniel W. Crofts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 356. $35.00 cloth; $34.99 ebook) On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. In the middle of his inaugural address he endorsed an amendment to the Constitution that had been passed by Congress only that morning. What would have been the first Thirteenth Amendment declared that Congress had no authority to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. Lincoln expressed his support for the so-called Corwin amendment by observing that he had “no objection to its being made express and irrevocable” (pp. 235–36). Long ignored by historians, the “other Thirteenth Amendment” has finally been treated to a detailed analysis by historian Daniel Crofts. In Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery, Crofts sets out to achieve two goals. The first is to present the political choreography behind the amendment; the second is to explore the contrast between the popular (and, sometimes, academic) perception of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and Lincoln’s willingness on the first day of his administration to accept the institution of slavery as a permanent [End Page 291] part of the Union in fifteen states. What has been termed the Corwin amendment (named for Ohio representative Thomas Corwin) becomes, in Crofts’s telling of the tale, the Seward amendment. In this well-researched and well-crafted narrative, Crofts argues persuasively that the proposal to declare slavery off-limits to congressional intervention was designed by Senator, and soon to be Secretary of State, William Seward. For his part, Seward’s amendment was in keeping with the Founding Fathers who had desired the eventual abolition of slavery but acted only to prevent its expansion. Crofts further explains that Seward’s proposition aligned with the 1860 Republican platform, which disclaimed any interest in or authority to interfere with slavery in the states. Seward’s intent was to offer a solution to the problem of secession at little or no cost to Republican ideology. Crofts systematically builds the argument that the moderate wing of the Republican Party (which encompassed a majority, but not the entirety, of the party), led by Seward, wanted, needed even, to counteract the southern mantra that their party was filled with abolitionists. Since the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, many southern political leaders attempted to paint the new northern alliance as favoring slave insurrections and immediate abolition. Although Seward and Lincoln and their followers looked forward to the day the country would be rid of the institution of slavery, only a handful of Republicans could be termed abolitionists. For Seward, therefore, promoting his amendment constituted prima facie evidence that the incoming administration was willing to tolerate slavery where it already existed and that Lincoln’s administration posed no threat to slavery where it was protected by state authority. Crofts also takes a long look at Lincoln historiography, especially historians who, in his words, “depict Republicans as virtual abolitionists” (p. 12). To that end, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery methodically and convincingly makes the point that Republicans consistently, with few exceptions, argued that they opposed the extension of slavery but had absolutely no designs on slavery in the states. In this regard, Crofts puts James Oaks’s Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery [End Page 292] in the United States, 1861–1865 (2013) in his cross-hairs and, to this reviewer, presents the stronger argument. The Abolitionist Lincoln, Crofts persuasively insists, only gradually emerged with the onset and continuance of the war. Daniel Crofts presents in Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery the first full-scale modern analysis of the Seward/Corwin amendment. By exploring the origins of this all-important episode in the run up to the war, Crofts sheds important light on the fundamental political issue that divided the nation. One might wish he had explored the motivations...

The Great Suspender's Unconstitutional Suspension of the Great Writ

The Emancipation Proclamation leads many Americans to regard Abraham Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.” Others are not so laudatory, doubting whether he did enough to end the South’s “peculiar institution.” These observers regard Lincoln as principally concerned with saving the Union, rather than ending slavery. There is a more fitting title for Lincoln, one utterly beyond cavil. Call him “The Great Suspender of the Great Writ.” He undoubtedly earned this sobriquet, having suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or delegated suspension authority almost a dozen times. He also has the distinction of being the only President ever to suspend the privilege of the Great Writ unilaterally and the only one to do so throughout the nation.