Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, 1861-1865 [Paperback]

William K. Klingaman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 2002

In this comprehensive account of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, William K. Klingaman takes a fresh look at what is arguably the most controversial reform in American history. Taking the reader from Lincoln's inauguration through the Civil War to his tragic assassination, it uncovers the complex political and psychological pressures facing Lincoln in his consideration of the slavery question, including his decision to issue the proclamation without consulting any member of his cabinet, and his meticulous attention to every word of the document. The book concludes with a discussion of what the Emancipation Proclamation really meant to four million newly freed blacks and its subsequent impact on race relations in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared free all slaves found in states rebelling against the Union. This epochal event is popularly regarded as the definitive triumph of abolition and earned Lincoln the title "The Great Emancipator." Yet in the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote that his "paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery." Klingaman (1929: The Year of the Great Crash; etc.) explains that Lincoln's bedrock principle on emancipation was to use it only if it would advance the cause of winning the war. Emancipation was not undertaken out of moral necessity, although Lincoln certainly disapproved of slavery, even despised it. Klingaman's study of emancipation demonstrates the complexity of the pressures brought to bear on Lincoln, not only from the virulently antagonistic forces in the nation as a whole, but also from within Lincoln's own mind. Klingaman fairly sets forth the evidence for his thesis (emancipation as a war measure), drawing on Lincoln's writings, including the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Perhaps the most convincing part of the book is the author's analysis of how Lincoln sifted the risks and benefits of emancipation in the early phases of the war. Freeing the slaves too soon could backfire by alienating the border states, such as Kentucky, and by stiffening the South's resolve. Klingaman shows how Lincoln agonized over these risks, finally choosing a militarily and psychologically apt moment for the proclamation. Lincoln emerges from this study not as a heroic advocate of racial equality, something he never was, but as an astute, troubled and effective defender of the Union.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This work examines the military, political, social, and economic events that mandated Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Klingaman (Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era) retraces the Great Emancipator's futile adherence to a program of gradual compensated emancipation and overseas colonization for the freedman, attributing these chimerical schemes to the President's passive nature and his penchant for allowing historical circumstances to overtake him and limit his executive options. Only the poor showing of Lincoln's armies, argues the author, compelled him to seize emancipation as a weapon of war. Klingaman ably demonstrates that the Proclamation, while driving away some elements from the commander-in-chief's original Civil War coalition, nevertheless undermined the rebel war effort, forestalled European recognition of the Confederacy, boosted Northern morale by offering a humanitarian ideal to undergird the preservation of the Union, assured the continued support of Radical Republicans, and allowed for the recruitment of African American troops. The conclusion emphasizes what this landmark document meant to both free and enslaved blacks and how its great legacy has been ill served by subsequent generations. Klingaman's story, although perhaps familiar to many readers, is nonetheless tightly focused and engagingly written. Recommended for all libraries.DJohn Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142000434
• ISBN-13: 978-0142000434
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #349,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The History of the Emancipation Proclamation, September 17, 2001

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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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.

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

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D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Growth of Lincoln, July 16, 2001

By 

scott sirk (Fishers, IN United States) - See all my reviews

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.