THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080181
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBOTHAM
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
THE PRESIDENCY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
PHILLIP SHAW PALUDAN
University Press of Kansas. 388 pp. $29.95.
Scores of books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, but few efforts have been as compelling as Phillip Shaw Paludan's The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
``The major premise of this book,'' writes Paludan, a University of Kansas history professor and the author of several Civil War-era books, is that ``freeing the slaves and saving the Union were (in Lincoln's mind) linked as one goal, not two optional goals. The Union Lincoln wanted to save was not a union where slavery was safe.'' At the same time, Paludan contends, Lincoln was committed to a constitutional system that, for the moment, protected slavery as it then existed.
Paludan argues that Lincoln reconciled these conflicting ideas by focusing on efforts to ``outlaw slavery in the territories and thus begin a process that would end it in the states. Slave states understood this; that is why they seceded.''
Revisionist historians, who argue that the war was not about slavery, will take issue with Paludan's argument. But they will have a hard time refuting it. As Paludan notes, Northerners and Southerners alike recognized that slavery had to expand to survive. And since the Southern economy was dependent on slavery, any efforts to inhibit it were regarded as a profound threat to the Southern way of life.
As the war dragged on, Lincoln continued to resist abolitionist measures he regarded as too radical. But Lincoln's conservatism did not prevent him from taking meaningful steps toward emancipation.
The Emancipation Proclamation, Paludan writes, did not, as some critics charge, ``free slaves only in places where could not reach them; freed the slaves in the only place where he could legally reach them - in places that he ruled under presidential war powers.'' In short, it placed ``the great ideal of freedom within the constitutional fabric - the only place that it could have life in a constitutional republic.''
Paludan's book does not focus exclusively on Lincoln's handling of emancipation. It also provides ample evidence of Lincoln's brilliance as a politician. And it includes a surprisingly balanced analysis of his abilities as a military leader. (His ``tactical understanding was flawed,'' Paludan writes, but ``his larger strategic ideas were sound.'')
The real importance of this book lies in its analysis of how Lincoln successfully appealed to ``the angels of our better nature'' at a time when other politicians, North and South, were feeding the public's hatreds and prejudices. It is a lesson that many of today's politicians would benefit from. MEMO: Tom Robotham is a historian and free-lance writer who lives in Norfolk.
His latest book is ``Native Americans in Early Photographs,'' published
by Thunder Bay Press. by CNB