The author tries to capture the social environment of Lincoln's times.
Reynolds illuminates aspects of Lincoln's life that most biographers miss. But strained connections between Lincoln and his cultural surroundings.
Does not make the mistake of reducing Lincoln to the sum of his surroundings.
What truly was most important with Lincoln: his political career and his views on slavery and race.
Reynolds is good at discerning the under culture of premodern America.
Lincoln is one our America's greatest writers as well as our greatest President.
Like Whitman, Reynolds says that Lincoln contained "multitudes."
Reynolds believes he has to call Lincoln "Abe."
The books is especially good on Lincoln's early years in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
No tobacco or liquor, for a time scorning organized religion, and feeding his mind with Pope, Burns, and Shakespeare.
Wilentz thinks Reynolds ambles off key at times like a jazz player showing his erudition on 19th century rabbit holes (my words).
Most of Reynolds excavations enrich our knowledge of the 19th Century.
"Brady and the Cooper Institute speech made me President." Abe Lincoln
Lincoln was freakishly ugly.
At Cooper Lincoln looked like a Barnum oddity.
Despite his appearance Lincoln won the crowd over with his evident integrity and simplicity of purpose.
Lincoln has been attacked over the years from both sides of the political spectrum.
In 1866 Edward A. Pollard published The Lost Cause."
A foundational text for Confederates then and Neo-Confederates today.
The left assails Lincoln as an egalitarian phony like Wendell Phillips in his own day,
Frederick Douglass's views in 1876 are more nuanced and judicious (my words).
The lefty's attack as a phony including Bennett continues to this day.
Reynolds says that Lincoln loathed slavery so much that he chose war over tolerating its spread.
Then how do we explain Lincoln saying in 1858 that emancipation might take a hundred years and his staying in his first inaugural that he had no opposition to the original 13th Amendment which would have locked slavery into the Constitution?
"If Lincoln hated slavery so much, why didn't he going the abolitionists?"
The abolitionists fervor would never break up the slaveholders's power according to Reynolds.
Lincoln represented anti-slavery Constitutionalism as opposed to immediate emancipation. The problem is that taking what was a potentially long view prolonged the suffering and wrongness of slavery for a very long time. Lincoln was a hard man; not a soft-hearted liberal egalitarian.
Reynolds rebukes the views of Bennet for their "falsity."
Reynolds remarks that Lincoln was a man of his own time and place.
Lincoln's casual racism of his time and place can always be accommodated if the historian wishes.
Of course Reynolds is white and Bennett is black.
Lincoln loved black spiritual music as if that exculpates his racism.
Lincoln's support of colonization is explained away.
Whether Lincoln moved away from colonization before he died is an open question.
In the end it was Brown's strategy not Lincoln's peaceful strategy that led to emancipation.
Then how you can avoid the view that events propelled Lincoln into glory?
Most of Lincoln's public record can be spun in different directions especially colonization.
It comes down to whether the historian likes or dislikes Lincoln.
It is almost impossible to have a balanced view of Lincoln.
Reynolds says that Lincoln held of the conventional racial views of the the time but he was able to transcend them. False praise I would say.
Reynolds says Lincoln was a man of his time and place and he can somehow forgive Lincoln for his enjoyment of minstrel shows and made racial slurs.
Lincoln may have looked forward to greater equality but he did not look very far (my opinion).
For sure Lincoln was always against slavery but he wasn't in any hurry before the war to hasten its end.
The war forced the immediate end of slavery which was totally unseen before the war.
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