| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lincoln's Legacy: Ethics and Politics. Ed. by Phillip Shaw Paludan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. x, 85 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03223-3.)

This slim volume contains thoughtful essays by four prominent scholars of the Civil War era. The essays focus on important questions about democracy, equality, the rule of law, and political ethics that Abraham Lincoln confronted, questions that are still relevant to us today. In a sharply worded essay, Phillip Shaw Paludan, who died before the book's publication, challenges the long-standing view that Lincoln was the preeminent democrat in the nation's history. Lincoln's "major commitment," Paludan contends, was to a government that governed the people and to the equality on which democracy rested rather than to democracy and/or "'the people' themselves" (p. 7). For Lincoln, equality and democracy were propositions rather than goals that had been achieved. Still, in contrast to Lincoln critics, Paludan maintains that Lincoln was a true egalitarian, and, as president, he abandoned his early racism and became a friend to black political and civil equality. Paludan, however, warns that Lincoln's egalitarian instincts should not be confused with a faith in pure democracy.

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