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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2004. Pp. xiii, 332. $26.00.
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| 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. |
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