4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The History of the Emancipation Proclamation, September 17, 2001
This review is from: Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation (Hardcover)
Klingaman's book concentrates on President Lincoln's issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and the Final Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. On a closely-related subject, the book also discusses the Union Army's gradual use of African-American soldiers as a means to winning the Civil War.
Klingaman focuse on the changes in Lincoln's attitude towards emancipation and his gradual assumption of a strong leadership role. He also points out that many of Lincoln's decisions were forced upon him by the political and military circumstances of the War. Thus, Klingaman describes how Lincoln's original goal in the War was the preservation of the Union. He resisted pressure from the Abolitionists and from the Radical Republicans to emancipate the slaves in order to avoid antagonizing the border states and those in the North who would not have fought a war to free the slaves. As political pressures changed, and as the North suffered setbacks in the Virginia theatre of the war, the pressures on Lincoln changed. Although the seeds of the Emancipation had been planted earlier, as Klingaman shows, Lincoln used the end Lee's invasion of the North at Antietam as the fulcrum to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and followed it up with the Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Klingaman explains well how the issuance of the Proclamation helped change the momentum of the War, militarily, politically, and internationally.
This book is not a work of new scholarship but it is valuable and worth reading nonetheless. Klingaman does a good job of emphasizing both the military and political aspects of the War, while many books concentrate on one or the other. I thought the book had particularly good insights to offer on Lincoln's relationship with Union General George McClellan.
Klingaman's Lincoln is primarily a politician and a pragmatist more than a political theorist. Lincoln's backwoods humor comes through well in the book as does his depression and sadness resulting from the heavy weight of his public and private trials. There are effective descriptions of pre-war Washington, D.C. which are followed by further descriptions of the way the city and our nation changed with the industrialization wrought by the War.
There are good textual discussions of both the Prelimary and Final Emancipation Proclamations which emphasize the compromises Lincoln had to make to politics rather than the role of ideas.
Finally, the book briefly discusses Emancipation following the conclusion of the War and points out eloquently how much remained and still remains to be done to bring about racial equality.
This book is a balanced and thoughtful history of the Emancipation for the reader interested in a seminal moment of our Nation's history.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A decent overview, despite the use of apocryphal quotes, February 11, 2005
This review is from: Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation (Hardcover)
In one of the most readable accounts available about Lincoln's leadership during the Civil War, Klingaman focuses on the Emancipation Proclamation and how Lincoln reached the decision to issue it. The author's thesis is twofold: that the Great Emancipator's primary goal was to save the Union from division and, as a result, that his decision to issue the proclamation, when he did, was based almost entirely on strategic and political factors rather than on moral grounds: "By emancipating the Confederacy's slaves as a war measure--and not as an act of justice toward the Negro--Lincoln subordinated the ideal of freedom to the preservation of the Union."
Klingaman's conclusion, of course, is hardly novel; most historians and general-interest writers (for example, James Baldwin) have always assumed as much. (This claim should not, however, be confused with the ongoing debate over whether the Civil War itself was caused primarily by the institution of slavery.) The author's aim here, then, is to moderate the popular image of Lincoln as a humanitarian saint while recognizing his worth as a stalwart, compassionate, and even apprehensive leader. A byproduct of Lincoln's wartime measure, emancipation was only the first (albeit significant) step in the struggle for equal rights in America: "Freedom would be won by the descendants of slaves, not bestowed upon them by whites."
The quibbles I have with the book are with the author's use of evidence. While Klingaman acknowledges in a bibliographical note that "a great deal of myth has become mixed with the fact" of Lincoln's life, he does little to sort the legend from the man. He indiscriminately blends Lincoln's words as recorded by such impeccably reliable sources as John Hay with writings by less dependable--and even suspect--observers, such as the portrait painter Francis Carpenter (who embarked on a career drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of allegedly firsthand Lincoln sayings and tales). In nearly every case, however, Klingaman presents secondhand sayings and speeches as if they were Lincoln's exact words, transcribed on the spot, even though many of these are embedded as paraphrased recollections in accounts recorded twenty or thirty years after Lincoln died.
An additional sixty-odd quotes are taken from Dan and Virginia Fehrenbacher's "The Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln," which, as Klingaman notes, "attempts to gauge the reliability of several hundred contemporary witnesses who claim to have recorded Lincoln's words." The Fehrenbachers rank the quotes from A (direct quotation recorded contemporaneously) to E (probably not authentic). Klingaman wisely avoids the least reliable quotes, but over half are direct and indirect paraphrases from months or years or decades later (which the Fehrenbachers have awarded a rank of C or D). These include a joke about interracial marriage attributed to Lincoln by a satirist known by the name of Petroleum V. Nasby, who was recalling the incident thirty years later; a speech allegedly delivered by Lincoln, recalled by Edward Stanly twenty years later in a report labeled by the Fehrenbachers as "self-serving, politically motivated, and chronologically erroneous"; a recollection by the minister Rudolph Schleiden ("it seems clear that Schleiden did not himself hear Lincoln speak these words," according to the Fehrenbachers); and two excerpts from a lengthy monologue attributed to Lincoln by Gideon Welles that is "a combination of Lincoln core and Welles elaboration."
One cannot entirely fault Klingaman for using these various quotations in a popular account, since many of them are quite colorful and most of them may well be accurate in their essence. The problem is the lack of proper identification. In each one of the previous examples, Klingaman does not name the mouthpiece for these "sayings," nor does he assess their reliability, nor does he even indicate, in the text or the notes, that these quotes are second- or third-hand (e.g., "Years later, Stanly claimed that Lincoln told him that..."). Surely, accurately represented quotations are essential in a biographical account concerning itself primarily with Lincoln's personal motives, intellectual growth, and political development.
Nevertheless, the book's portrayal of the events of the Civil War is largely accurate and, in spite of my serious reservations about the author's use of sources, even his characterization of Lincoln, in its broadest strokes, seems true to life. Although this volume will not satisfy those readers with a broad knowledge of Lincoln and the Civil War (and it should be approached cautiously by students), it's still a worthy introduction to the subject.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Growth of Lincoln, July 16, 2001
This review is from: Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation (Hardcover)
This book is a good examination of Lincoln's policy regarding Emancipation. The author points out the growth of Lincoln from a disoragnized beginning to a master politician/statesman as President of the United States. The author fairly contrasts the differing political pressures of the Radical Repbulicans and the loyal Border State politicians in regared to the policy of Emancipation. Lincoln's consistent theme that slavery was a sin of the entire nation North and South. The policy of Emancipation was interrelated and effected by the military triumphs and tradegies. I disagree with the author on the point that Lincoln's policy to Emancipation showed his "passive nature". I believe his policy on Emancipation showed his consistency and greatness. The consistency of his belief in the Constitution and his belief that if slavery were properly limted under the Constitution it would die a natural death. His ultimate goal, never ending despite the tradegy of the war, was that the Union must be preserved. His greatness was to adapt to the changing opportunities caused by the war in a way which ennobled and redeemed the Nation and its people.
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