| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. By Harry V. Jaffa. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. xiv, 550 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8476-9952-8.)

I fear that Harry V. Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom will provoke some very mixed reactions. Readers will either love it or hate it; perhaps unjustly so, because there are good reasons both to love it and to hate it. 1

The principal virtue of Jaffa's book is the seriousness with which it treats its main topic. That topic is ostensibly Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship in the years immediately preceding the Civil War; the book is a long-awaited sequel to Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959) and anticipates a third volume on Lincoln's statesmanship during the Civil War. This volume, however, like the first one, is not a typical historical narrative. The main topic of the book is really a philosophic proposition that Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, claimed the nation was dedicated to: the proposition that "all men are created equal." . . .

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