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Reviews
| Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery. By Richard Striner. (Oxford, England; New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. (viii) + 308. Notes, select bibliography, index. Cloth, $28.)
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So far as a title can indicate the contents of a book, this one fits perfectly. It reminds us that Abraham Lincoln reentered national politics in the 1850s because he was opposed to slavery. Because the institution itself was protected by the Constitution and by public opinion, but Lincoln could campaign against its territorial expansion. He campaigned first against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, then against the Dred Scott decision, and against Stephen A. Douglas and his concept of "popular sovereignty," for a seat in the U. S. Senate. After losing this election (though he seems to have won a majority of the actual votes), he had sufficient following outside Illinois to campaign for president, winning the Republican nomination and then the general election. Though president and party pledged to leave slavery alone in the states where it was already established, Lincoln's pro-slavery opponents, by no means entirely restricted to the South, understood that he would prevent the further growth of slavery, while the number of free states would continue to grow. They also understood him when he argued, repeatedly, that slavery was wrong, and ought to be set in the course of extinction; nor could they forget he had said the nation could not long continue half-slave and half-free. Lincoln was no abolitionist; yet he clearly threatened slavery more than any or all of the abolitionists. He won the presidency, and his party won a majority of the electoral offices in the free states. While many moderates from free as well as border slave states urged him to compromise on the question of expansion, Lincoln steadfastly refused. For the seven slave states that seceded and first formed the Confederate States of America, there was no question of compromise. A majority in the North had voted against slavery. |
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Once in office and confronted with secession and a great Civil War, Lincoln moved opportunistically to balance holding Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union, while cooperating with Congress to begin the process of dismantling slavery. Before the celebrated—or despised—Emancipation proclamations, there were two Confiscation Acts, the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia, an act freeing slaves who crossed Union lines, and an offer by Congress to pay slaveholders to free their slaves. Once pledged to emancipation, Lincoln increased pressure on the border slave states to free their slaves, enrolled African Americans in the Union army, secured emancipation in Louisiana, lobbied for the Thirteenth Amendment, and signed the unprecedented act creating the Freedmen's Bureau. |
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"Well, yes," Lincoln buffs might say. "Did we not know all of this already?" Strange to say, these facts have often been paraded as if Lincoln was somehow forced to become the anti-slavery president. It is surely true that Lincoln hoped, on March 4, 1861, that there would be no war, that the deep South would abandon secession, and that slavery would fade away over many years; it had already done so in the British and French Empires, as well as the northern states. The terrible Civil War, however, allowed him to act more swiftly than any but radical abolitionists could have hoped or expected. |
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It is the exceptional merit of Richard Striner's book that it makes the most compelling case yet for Lincoln's persistent, steady, and determined efforts to do away with the curse of American slavery. He does so by placing each of Lincoln's acts within its political and military context, so that one can see both the possibilities and obstacles confronting the president. Striner also reminds us that Lincoln was not always candid: the most famous example was his public letter to Horace Greeley. Therein he declared that if he could save the Union without freeing slaves he would do so, or if he could only save the Union by freeing all the slaves he would do so, or if he could save it by freeing some but not others he would also do so. But we have long known that he had already made up his mind to free all the slaves held in Confederate territory, and was doing his best to free the slaves remaining in the more or less loyal slave states. |
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