Lincoln's Emancipation Research Articles

MILITARY NECESSITY AND THE DEMANDS OF JUSTICE - Burris M. Carnahan: Act of Justice: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. 202. $40.00.)

MILITARY NECESSITY AND THE DEMANDS OF JUSTICE - Burris M. Carnahan: Act of Justice: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. 202. $40.00.) - Volume 70 Issue 3

Lincoln, Race, and Slavery: 1856-1865

In April 1859, Abraham Lincoln wrote, All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce ... abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times (1). Lincoln, here, as he would all his life, affirmed the literal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence all men are created equal. Yet one of the more difficult topics to explore with students is the place of race in the story of Abraham Lincoln. At times, Lincoln's words appeared contradictory. To fully understand Lincoln, teachers and students need to examine the dynamics of race, with its connection to Lincoln, slavery, and the tenor of his times. In recent years, critics have called Lincoln racist. By freeing only those slaves in areas controlled by the Confederacy, the critics argue that Lincoln's emancipation was motivated by political rather than moral or humanitarian reasons. In this lesson, students will compare Lincoln's attitudes on race to his contemporaries to demonstrate how Lincoln's attitudes evolved over time. In short, students will explore Lincoln's transition from moderate voice to a man who was convinced that the institution of slavery must be permanently destroyed.

Revisiting Lincoln and Emancipation

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...

:Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.

Allen C. Guelzo's meticulous and imaginative analysis of the origins and impact of the Emancipation Proclamation resurrects that beleaguered document as the cornerstone of freedom for America's four million slaves. Abraham Lincoln's personal commitment to emancipation has suffered egregiously at the hands of critics, both scholarly and popular, who discount his proclamation's centrality to emancipation while pointing to his zest for compensated emancipation and colonization as an indication of his true feelings—lukewarm, vacillating, and even racist—toward African‐American freedom. Guelzo's masterful reconstruction of Lincoln's motives and methods, rendered within the political and military context in which they played out, challenges the notion that the Emancipation Proclamation “accomplished nothing” (p. 2) and reinforces Lincoln's genuine personal commitment to end slavery. The crux of Guelzo's argument is his portrayal of Lincoln as an “Enlightenment president” who was steadfast in his pursuit of freedom but equally “prudent” in his efforts to attain and secure it. “Emancipation, for Lincoln, was never a question of the end,” Guelzo reasons, “but of how to construct the means in such a way that the end was not put into jeopardy” (p. 25). Guelzo surveys several possible routes to freedom: self‐emancipation, military decree, congressional legislation, executive proclamation, and state legislative action. Weighing these options, Lincoln distrusted the federal judiciary to uphold either a presidential proclamation or congressional legislation freeing slaves and considered state legislative action the only way of permanently guaranteeing emancipation. Throughout his presidency, therefore, Lincoln worked tenaciously to wring emancipation from the states, beginning with the four loyal border states. Depending on state action, however, meant that emancipation must be gradual, compensated, and voluntary and include the prospect of colonization to make it workable within a racist society. Simply put, as a pragmatist Lincoln was determined to work patiently for freedom, state by state, recognizing realistically that the means must be as legal and constitutional as the end was necessary and moral. Hence, Lincoln clung tenaciously to his dream of “state by state” emancipation—what an abolitionist critic labeled “shooting a gun a little at a time” (p. 95)—from the beginning of his presidency to the end.

Removing the Mask of Nationality: Unionism, Racism, and Federal Military Occupation in North Carolina, 1862-1865

As DAWN CAST ITS SHIMMERING LIGHT OVER THE SLEEPY LITTLE PORT OF Beaufort, North Carolina, on soggy morning of March 26, 1862, local residents awoke to find their world had changed overnight. They had drifted off to sleep night before as residents of quiet Confederate municipality but awakened to find themselves inhabitants of newest Federal outpost in North America. An expedition under command of General Ambrose E. Burnside had captured Roanoke Island in February and New Bern on March 14, before advancing on Beaufort and Fort Macon, which guarded Beaufort's harbor. During wet, foggy night of March 25, two companies from Fourth Rhode Island regiment shoved off from Morehead City, quietly rowed past Fort Macon, landed at Beaufort's wharf, and marched into this county seat of Carteret County on southern tip of Outer Banks, marking beginning of Union occupation that would last rest of war. (1) President Abraham Lincoln and many Federal authorities anticipated that majority of local white citizens would be loyal, and they expected to utilize this sentiment to foster harmonious reconstruction. Lincoln believed that show of force and benevolence by Union army would bring thousands back to Union fold. Thus, initial Union policy throughout South was one of conciliation, and early experience along North Carolina's coast was no different. Lincoln even appointed native son, Edward Stanly, as military governor of state in May 1862 to help reconstitute local self-government and reassure local population of national government's limited aims of restoring Union. Early results seemed positive; indeed, people of Carteret appeared to be grateful Unionists whom Lincoln envisioned. Residents, seeking to take advantage of new economic opportunities while simultaneously maintaining social status quo, wedded themselves to Union. Yet, just few months into honeymoon, many apparent Unionists rejected their occupiers, primarily over perceived arbitrary uses of Federal power and serious disagreements over racial policies. Contrary to Lincoln's optimism, experience of Union occupation would ultimately drive local residents more firmly into Confederate camp than they otherwise would have been. (2) Many scholars have shown that Lincoln too readily placed firm faith in southern Unionism. William C. Harris argues that Lincoln consistently overestimated Unionist strength during war, while he conversely ... underestimated support of Southern people for rebellion. Stephen V. Ash points out that not only Lincoln but also most northerners believed that a large proportion of Confederacy's citizens were loyal Unionists subjugated and silenced by Rebel despots.... William Blair argues that problem was that northerners misunderstood benign actions of many southern citizens; in Blair's words, northerners confused acquiescence with loyalty. Hence, standard scholarly argument asserts that in late 1862 when northern soldiers occupying South realized their error, they shifted from policy of conciliation toward one of much harsher tone in reaction to surprisingly inveterate southern hostility. (3) While scholars may agree that Union soldiers figuratively took off their kid gloves and displayed the hard hand of war in reaction to southern hostility, in eastern North Carolina hostility of white southerners (including Unionists) was reaction to Federal occupation that they perceived as oppressive, callous, and radical, especially in terms of race. In wake of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, local whites realized that what had been limited to restore Union had become sweeping, society-changing war, much like secessionist fire-eaters had predicted. This serious disagreement over nature of Union policy simply lit fuse of discontent. …

Ontological security and the power of self-identity: British neutrality and the American Civil War

Why did Great Britain remain neutral during the American Civil War? Although several historical arguments have been put forth, few studies have explicitly used International Relations (IR) theories to understand this decision. Synthesising a discursive approach with an ontological security interpretation, I propose an alternative framework for understanding security-seeking behaviour and threats to identity. I assess the impact Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had upon the interventionist debates in Great Britain. I argue that the Proclamation reframed interventionist debates, thus (re)engendering the British anxiety over slavery and removing intervention as a viable policy. I conclude by proposing several issues relevant to using an ontological security interpretation in future IR studies.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: the end of slavery in America

One of the nation's foremost Lincoln scholars offers an authoritative consideration of the document that represents the most far-reaching accomplishment of our greatest president. No single official paper in American history changed the lives of as many Americans as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. But no American document has been held up to greater suspicion. Its bland and lawyerlike language is unfavorably compared to the soaring eloquence of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural; its effectiveness in freeing the slaves has been dismissed as a legal illusion. And for some African-Americans the raises doubts about Lincoln himself. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation dispels the myths and mistakes surrounding the Emancipation and skillfully reconstructs how America's greatest president wrote the greatest American proclamation of freedom.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America

Liberal Visions of Reconstruction: Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes

You ought ... make some other arrangement, or presently you, too, will be ... under shadow of Ethiopian. --The Grandissimes When Lee surrendered Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 8, 1865, what has since been labeled first modern had come a sobering conclusion. At a cost much higher than expected by either of warring parties, some old and tenacious issues were finally resolved. As historian David Potter puts it, was dead, secession was dead, and six hundred thousand men were dead. (1) Yet, despite Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, ratification of Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and Supreme Court's subsequent affirmation of indestructible Union, what would prove be most volatile issue gripping postwar America had been left unresolved. (2) Observed Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in 1866: It seems our fate never get rid of question. No sooner have we abolished slavery than a party, which seems [to] be growing in power, proposes suffrage, so that problem--What shall we do with Negro--seems as far from being settled as ever. (3) While Lincoln's inaugural admonition to do all which may achieve and cherish a and lasting among ourselves seemed have been embraced almost universally, profound disagreement prevailed as precise nature of this just peace and practical means by which nationalization could or should be accomplished. Where white supremacists such as Thomas Nelson Page contended that disfranchisement of Negro was permanent good of both radical black activists such as Frederick Douglass demanded inclusion of the in body politic, warning that if black men have no rights in eyes of white men, of course whites cannot have any in eyes of blacks. The result is a war of races, and annihilation of all proper human relations. (4) Amidst this polarized debate between old-school white supremacists and newly energized black activists, white authors writing in Anglo-American humanist tradition, with its deep roots in abolitionist movement, found themselves in an uneasy double bind. On one hand, they clearly recognized legitimacy of demands for unrestricted racial equality and a truly egalitarian society. On other hand, however, they also perceived necessity of asserting undiminished moral and political leadership of their own liberal white middle class. Tarnished by dehumanizing experience of slavery, humanism, apply Georg Lukacs' analysis, had reaffirm itself as both source and standard bearer of social progress. (5) Prior Civil War, bourgeois liberals had habitually professed social progressiveness through their embrace of more or less radical abolitionist tenets and a firm commitment free market economy, which was said reveal a fundamental harmony of interests across class and race lines. Of course, in light of growing labor unrest in industrialized North, such outspoken agitation against chattel slavery and ringing endorsements of free market were hardly void of self-interest. As David Brion Davis has shown within British context, liberal denunciations of slavery opened new sources of moral prestige for dominant social class, helped define a participatory role for middle class activism, and looked forward universal goal of compliant, loyal, and self-disciplined workers. (6) Still, white abolitionists' rejection of racialist thinking and allegiance democratic universalism certainly boded well for four million blacks who escaped bondage after war. In fall of 1865, George William Curtis, former abolitionist circuit speaker and since 1863 editor-in-chief of Harper's Weekly, augured that America's Good Fight would soon result in the total overthrow of spirit of caste by reminding his readers that Government of United States was made by men of all races and all colors, not for white men, but for refuge and defense of men. …

The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South

In the Cotton South before World War II, every task, from plowing to cultivating to harvesting the crop, was done by hand. These labor-intensive practices, coupled with too many farmers -- both tenants and owners -- trying to survive on small, uneconomical farms, kept the region poor, backward, and unmechanized. From 1940 to 1970, however, in the Great Migration, southern blacks and whites thronged to new opportunities in the postwar, industrial North. In this revisionist study, Donald Holley marshals impressive statistical and narrative evidence to show that mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi only after the region's oversupply of small farmers was reduced. He thereby corrects a long-standing belief that mechanization pushed labor off the land. Development of the mechanical cotton picker not only made possible the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, it helped free the region of Jim Crow laws as political power was relocated from farms to cities and thereby opened the door for the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Just as President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed African Americans from chattel slavery, the mechanical cotton picker freed laborers from the drudgery of the cotton harvest and brought the agricultural South into a period of greater prosperity.

Henry James's Boston

IN SEPTEMBER 1862 Henry James journeyed from Newport to Cam bridge and registered as a student at Harvard Law School. He was nineteen years old. He took lodgings in Winthrop Square, an old market area between Winthrop and Mt. Auburn Sts., near what is now Grendel's Den. Boston, famous old Puritan cap?tol, was new to him. It was not only center of culture, the concentrated of history, Bos ton of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Ticknor, Motley, Prescott, and Parkman, but at time focus of American industrial fortunes in nineteenth century?overseas trade, banking and investments, railroads, real estate, and textiles. It was also, in spite of its refinements, narrow and provincial. According to his biog rapher, Leon Edel, James could never reconcile himself to gentility of Brahmins, or manner in which New England considered culture to be an arduous duty rather than a joy of life and civilization. His brother, William, studying medicine at Lawrence Scientific School, was living at Miss Upham's boarding house at corner of Kirk land and Oxford Sts. Cambridge was small, a village of leafy elms, solitary houses on long slopes, cows grazing on commons. Harvard itself was a college of only 1000 students and thirty teachers. James considered himself a singularly alien member of law school. subject bored him. Lowell's literary lectures were of much greater interest. For next six years he stayed on, becoming fully acquainted with life in Back Bay and Cambridge. Civil War was raging, and was at height of Abolition fever, fueled by local firebrands like Thoreau, Lydia Maria Child, and Wendell Phillips. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, was minister of Park St. Church where Sen. Charles Sumner earlier had given his great oration, The War Systems of Nations. On New Year's Day James joined a multitude at Music Hall celebrating Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. On crowded platform reading his Boston Hymn was Ralph Waldo Emer son, held in esteem by young James, who'd once met him in New York, as the first, and one really rare, American spirit in letters. At 22, Henry James moved to 13 Ashburton Place?behind State House?where his parents now lived, having themselves traveled to Bos

War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power: 1829-1901 (review)

370CIVIL WAR HISTORY a major revision of ideas almost codified by Wilbur Cash in The Mind of the South. Harold Wilson Old Dominian University War, Foreign Affairs, and Constitutional Power: 1829-1901. By Henry Bartholomew Cox. (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1984. Pp. xx, 413. $35.00.) This thorough and meticulous book, the second volume of a comprehensive study of the war powers of the president and Congress, is sponsored by the American Bar Association. Mastering a wide array of secondary accounts, and relying especially on a close reading of the Congressional Globe and Record, Cox traces the ebb and flow of the executivecongressional struggle over foreign policy prerogatives from the era of Andrew Jackson to the Spanish-American war. The book is organized into four broad chapters covering chronological periods, but within each chapter similar issues of executive-congressional relations are treated topically, not chronologically. The use and misuse of executive agents, the sending of troops into border regions, the ratification and modification of treaties, the power of appointment and removal, the release and withholding of sensitive information—all receive as much comment and analysis as the fundamental question of who has the authority to involve the nation in war. It is to Cox's credit that he can make such an obscure episode as President Buchanan's authority to use force against Paraguay in 1858 to retaliate for the Water Witch incident as relevant as his discussion of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation or McKinley's struggle with Congress over war with Spain in the spring of 1898. In Cox's judgment, the period of continental expansion (1845-57) marked the high point of executive supremacy in foreign affairs, especially evident in the single-minded exploits of President Polk—"by far the most skillful manipulator of information" (p. 168). The nadir of executive prerogative came during the Civil War period (1857-69), most notably when Congress severely restricted Andrew Johnson's capacity as commander -in-chief and virtually denied him the power of appointment and removal. Cox acknowledges the vast wartime powers exercised by Lincoln , but points out that "Congress's ratification of executive steps taken while it was not in session was a statement of its legislative retention of authority and not release of power to the president" (p. 245). The Jacksonian era and the post-Civil War period were characterized by relatively equal contests between the Congress and the executive. Cox underlines the contemporary relevance of his study by emphasizing that the same Congress that "came the closest in history to making war on its own" (p. 330) in the spring of 1898 was clearly bested by President McKinley as he formulated a strategy for victory, shaped peace terms personally, and initiated a war of imperial conquest in the Philippines virtually without BOOK REVIEWS371 congressional dissent. The next time Congress debates the meaning of the War Powers Act with respect to American forces in Lebanon, Central America, or some other distant trouble spot, this fine record of nineteenth -century patterns should provide intellectual ammunition for both sides of the battle. J. Garry Clifford University of Connecticut Chinese in the Post Civü War South: A People Without a History. By Lucy M. Cohen. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pp. xviii, 211. $22.50.) Some titles perfectly describe a monograph. Cohen provides a good example . The experiment by some Southern planters, who had lost confidence in the labors of freedmen, to import Chinese as an alternate source of cheap, dependable labor has never been adequately explored. Had the experiment not been a failure, a wider range of vital sources might be available. Had the author not been thus hamstrung, the story of the Chinese might become a more vivid chapter in Southern history. Antebellum Protestants developed an interest in the Chinese people through the foreign mission activities of their churches. Their physical introduction occurred when enterprising missionaries transported converts to exhibit as "curiosity pieces"—such "evidence of their accomplishments " was very effective in fundraising. Under postwar circumstances, the Chinese became "Coolies," not merely potential souls for Christ but a potential source of cheap labor as they had been on West Indian plantations and American West railroad gangs...

George Herbert Mead: Philosophy and the Pragmatic Self

George Herbert Mead was born at the height of America's bloody Civil War in 1863, the year of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. He was born in New England, in the small town of South Hadley, Massachusetts; but when he was seven years old his family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, so that his father, Hiram Mead, a Protestant minister, could assume a chair in homiletics at the Oberlin Theological Seminary. After his father's death in 1881, Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings Mead, briefly taught at Oberlin College. (She later served as the president of Mount Holyoke College from 1890 to 1900.) Mead grew to self-consciousness in this educational atmosphere, amidst the conflict between science and religion over the primacy of efficient or final explanations; and he offers us, in some autobiographical comments, a sense of the difficulties felt by one who saw values on either side: We wished to be free to follow our individual thinking and feeling into an intelligent and sympathetic world without having to bow before incomprehensible dogma or to anticipate the shipwreck of our individual ends and values. We wanted full intellectual freedom and yet the conservation of the values for which had stood Church, State, Science, and Art.

George Herbert Mead: Philosophy and the Pragmatic Self

George Herbert Mead was born at the height of America's bloody Civil War in 1863, the year of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. He was born in New England, in the small town of South Hadley, Massachusetts; but when he was seven years old his family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, so that his father, Hiram Mead, a Protestant minister, could assume a chair in homiletics at the Oberlin Theological Seminary. After his father's death in 1881, Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings Mead, briefly taught at Oberlin College. (She later served as the president of Mount Holyoke College from 1890 to 1900.) Mead grew to self-consciousness in this educational atmosphere, amidst the conflict between science and religion over the primacy of efficient or final explanations; and he offers us, in some autobiographical comments, a sense of the difficulties felt by one who saw values on either side: We wished to be free to follow our individual thinking and feeling into an intelligent and sympathetic world without having to bow before incomprehensible dogma or to anticipate the shipwreck of our individual ends and values. We wanted full intellectual freedom and yet the conservation of the values for which had stood Church, State, Science, and Art.

Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS67 conditions) in shaping nineteenth century partisan loyalties. But let it be clear that the criticism here is not that Baker did not find particular social cleavages to my liking, but that she failed to identify solidly any such cleavages other than the quintessential and unavoidable racial element. Did nativism and anti-Catholicism really become insignificant after 1859? Did evangelical-pietist impulses play only an occasionally (and casually) noted role in Know-Nothingism, Unionism, and Republicanism ? There are many hints which suggest that the answer to these questions could lead to a more subtle analysis of electoral politics than Baker has given us. A recent dissertation by Douglas Shaw (University of Rochester) shows that in Jersey City the economic, religious, and ethnic conflicts of the late 1850s continued to excite city politics to 1870, and, like Baker, Shaw argues that the Civil War was not a turning point. It may be that group conflicts in Northern communities were not present in Maryland—yet, again, there are clues in Baker's book suggesting the contrary: in the Democratic splinter States' Rights party of 1861 nominating a Catholic for governor, in the Unionist (Know Nothing) use of evangelicalism and antiparty and the religious ties of its leaders, in the crusading Union Leagues which resembled the Know Nothing lodges, in evidence that religion did strongly intertwine with politics (pp. 98, 157, 180, 183), in the Democrats slapping their opponents in the 1867 Constitution by forbidding ministers to hold state office, in the moralistic crusade of Republican-Unionist Hugh Bond, and more. In the mid-1860's a registry law became a divisive party issue, and Unionists promoted it to disfranchise the disloyal and recalcitrant. Baker discusses the issue solely in terms of party divisions regarding the War, but in the North registry laws were a favorite program of nativists, and one wonders if the quarrel lacked this meaning in Maryland. That Baker's book raises so many questions is at least partly to her credit. Though she failed to push analysis deeper, Baker built solidly where she did venture. If Baker or others continue to probe this period of Maryland politics, her book provides a competent beginning. Ronald P. Formisano Clark University Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War. By Mary Ellison. (University of Chicago Press, 1973. Pp. ix, 259. $10.50.) This book effectively demolishes the century-old myth that Lancashire cotton-workers, though starved by the Federal blockade of Southern ports, stubbornly supported the North—that because of their love of American-style democracy and their belief that by supporting the Union they were fighting slavery, they bravely resisted British rulingclass intervention schemes. Basing her conclusions on thorough research in Lancashire news- 68CIVIL WAR HISTORY papers and manuscript collections, and on a careful scrutiny of Hansard 's Parliamentary Debates, contemporary books and pamphlets, and most of the pertinent literature published since the 1860s, Mrs. Ellison has found that "the assumption that most Radicals and Nonconformists were pro-North is not founded on fact." She has discovered that working -class and middle-class opinion in the cotton spinning areas of the southeast and in the weaving areas of the northeast, as well as in the large towns of Manchester and Liverpool, heavily favored the cause of the Confederacy, while only the agricultural western region tended to sympathize with the North. She has determined that most of the people in the Lancashire cotton towns "were unshakably convinced that Northern schemes for emancipation were no more than amoral weapons in the armory of war," and that abolition of slavery in America "could and would emerge only from a free South." The west "stood alone in all Lancashire in its basic faith in Northern abolition." And although Manchester and Liverpool were somewhat divided on the subject, the weight of opinion in these large towns "condemned Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as a useless act of war and pinned their faith on emancipation by a free South." Support for neutrality and non-interference "there certainly was" in Lancashire, Mrs. Ellison has asserted, "but it was small and insignificant when compared with the demand for a move to aid the South." In Lancashire there were...

John Quincy Adams on the war powers of congress

John Quincy Adams’ speech of May 25, 1836, contains the first public enunciation of the constitutional justification for the emancipation of slaves in the event of a civil war. Although an opportunity for applying Adams’ doctrine was not immediately available, his speech seems to have been as closely related to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, as his speech of July 4, 1821, was to the Monroe Doctrine.

Midwestern Opposition to Lincoln's Emancipation Policy

Midwestern Opposition to Lincoln's Emancipation Policy

Lincoln's Other Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln's Other Emancipation Proclamation

The Lincoln Emancipation Statue

The Lincoln Emancipation Statue