| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race. By George M. Fredrickson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. xii, 156 pp. $19.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02774-9.)

The late George M. Fredrickson left a rich legacy of works mining American thinking about race, slavery, and national interest and identity. This succinct and satisfying book, based on the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures that Fredrickson delivered at Harvard University in 2006, is a fitting last call to revisit those contentious issues by seeing them through the experience of Abraham Lincoln and by examining the ways his contemporaries and later historians came to understand them because of Lincoln. Fredrickson takes as his theme the famous 1922 statement of Du Bois that Lincoln was "big enough to be inconsistent—cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves" (as quoted, pp. 2–3). With deft strokes, Fredrickson paints a portrait of Lincoln as consistent on slavery and conflicted on race. Entering the tangle of abundant and contradictory literature on Lincoln that casts him variously as the savior of the Union, the Great Emancipator, and the progenitor of black civil rights or, especially more recently, as a reluctant emancipator, a racist, and a pro-southern advocate for an easy reconstruction, Fredrickson charts a middle course.

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