Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies. The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action—in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade—they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonization of free Blacks abroad. President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King’s cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.
While standard accounts frame the coming of the Civil War as strictly a conflict between the North and the South who were competing to expand their way of life, Arenson shifts the focus to the distinctive culture and politics of the ...
Explores the Civil War and the anti-slavery movement, specifically highlighting the plan to help abolish slavery by surrounding the slave states with territories of freedom and discusses the possibility of what could've been a more peaceful ...
The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority.
130–1; James Cooper Nisbet, Four Years on the Firing Line (Jackson, Tenn.: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1963) ... 189; William C. Davis, Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 403. 6.
“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong ...
mcPherson, Battle Cry ofFreedom: The Civil War Era (New york: oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 718–750; michael burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 665–680.
James Oakes has written a masterful narrative history, bringing two iconic figures to life and shedding new light on the central issues of slavery, race, and equality in Civil War America.
Sanders, Charles W. While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in NineteenthCentury ...
Worse still, a new group of politicians from Indiana joined James Beggs and began to attack slavery and the Harrison faction. Six talented and disaffected former associates of Harrison led the emerging antislavery opposition.
A recent conference on Lincoln at Gettysburg resulted in this remarkable book of essays by distinguished Civil War scholars and Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, with an introduction by William C. Davis.