| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carl F. Wieck. Lincoln's Quest for Equality: The Road to Gettysburg. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press. 2002. Pp. x, 214. $36.00.

Carl F. Wieck is a very bold historian. Who would guess that anyone could contribute something new and different to Garry Wills's study of the Gettysburg address and its origins? (Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America [1992]). This book presents Abraham Lincoln as a cautious and shrewd politician but one with strong antislavery convictions from the very start of his career. Masterfully, Wieck threads his analytical way from the Illinois politician's brief congressional sojourn (1846–1848) to the momentous speech in 1864. Central to his perspective is his insistence that the two elements of prudence and reform balanced each other in an astonishing way. This point of view will not satisfy those who claim that the "Great Emancipator" was nothing of the sort but instead proved to be a single-minded racist who freed the slaves for reasons of realpolitik alone. Wieck proposes that Lincoln was much closer in sympathy and ideology to the radical abolitionists than one might suspect. According to the author, Theodore Parker, the renowned intellectual and reformer, furnished Lincoln with more ideas and stylistic phrases than has been acknowledged before now. This is no easy interpretation to substantiate beyond all doubt. Nonetheless, Wieck's analysis does give Lincoln scholars an issue to ponder.

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