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Reviews
| Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. By Douglas L. Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Pp. 344. Illus., notes, appendix, index. Cloth, $26.95.)
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This is the winner of the 2007 Lincoln Prize. It is a study of Lincoln's rhetoric, reminding us that Douglas L. Wilson of Knox College was a literary scholar before establishing himself as a first-rate historian. His multiple talents are fully in play in this fascinating study of Lincoln's major public papers. We are treated to an illuminating discussion of how Lincoln composed his major speeches and public letters, including both analysis of the rhetoric and, where early drafts exist, a demonstration of how Lincoln kept working on his texts until they said exactly what he meant. With a masterful framing of the historical circumstances and purposes of each writing, Wilson brings us close to the inner Lincoln as we are ever likely to be — a remarkable achievement. |
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A prologue reminds us of Lincoln's education, much of which was self-guided, and especially his fascination with the meanings and uses of words. |
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Like most beginners, Lincoln's early efforts were imitative, and many were satiric. His political career brought forth a certain amount of partisan bombast, but one could see glimpses of the mature Lincoln in occasional pieces. Just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act brought Lincoln back into politics, it also endowed him with a message and an eloquent style of delivery that made him rapidly gain local and national attention. The crisis of the Union was, politically and rhetorically speaking, the making of Abraham Lincoln. |
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Wilson gives full chapters to Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, the speech to the special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, the Emancipation Proclamation, the public letter known as a "Reply to Horace Greeley" (August 22, 1862), the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural Address. Another chapter, following the reply to Greeley, considers the public letter to Erastus Corning and the Democrats of Albany, New York (June 12, 1863), along with the public letter to James Conkling and the Republicans of Springfield, Illinois (August 26–27, 2007). The first, and more famous of these letters, defended the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus on constitutional and ethical grounds; the second defended enrolling African American soldiers in the Union Army on grounds of justice and patriotism. |
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The book begins with reflections on the most eminent public intellectual of the mid-19th Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson had called for a new literary voice to celebrate America, and had discerned something of it in the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like many, but by no means all, of his literary contemporaries, Emerson long failed to appreciate the originality of Lincoln's consistently excellent prose. This strange failure Emerson redeemed, at the end of Lincoln's life, which Wilson notes at the end of his excellent book. |
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