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The Age of Lincoln

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The Age of Lincoln" by Dr. Orville Vernon Burton is an insightful , hard headed , clear eyed look at the roots of the American Civil War , the path that led to eventual victory and the utter failure of Lincoln's successors to "win" the peace as decisively as he had won the war. This book is a stunning feat of original thinking, scholarship, and research. The depth and the breadth of the research is revealed in the many details of what was taking place in the political , social , religious and economic strata of American life during this tumultuous time. The weaving of these disparate elements into a cogent tapestry is a testament to Dr. Burton's scholarship. Dr. Burton's mastery of his voluminous research and his skill in writing a riveting narrative only enhances his standing as an American historian of the first order.

As Dr Burton shows the "original sin" of our founding fathers to face the question of slavery as a blot on the face of humanity in "The Declaration of Independence" and ""The Constitution" sowed the seeds that produced the bloody harvest of the Southern Rebellion. The evolution of President Lincoln's thinking of "The Emancipation Proclamation" as a strategic war maneuver to an act of basic humanity reflects Lincoln's antipathy towards slavery and his changing feelings on the equality of the races. While Lincoln was still evolving in his recognition of the equality of African Americans to the white's of America his legacy of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution ultimately redeemed the promise of the founding fathers.

Dr. Burton's book illustrates that just as slavery's darkest shadow lays across the trinity of our most precious documents, the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights Bill for almost a hundred years, the dark shadow of the Jim Crow era would eclipse the bright promise of Lincoln's legacy to mankind the 13th, 14th and15th amendment of the Constitution. Because of Lincoln's successors failures to stay the course with Reconstruction and the ultimate perversions of the Restoration and the Jim Crow era another hundred years of lynching, murder, degradation, economic slavery and forced migration faced African Americans most egregiously in the American south.
Dr. Burton's book also pounds the stake into the heart of the argument of the Civil War being fought over any thing but slavery. Over shadowing and intruding into all aspects of life during the arc of the age of Lincoln was slavery,slavery.slavery.


This book resonates with the passion that the American public had for public affairs during "The Age of Lincoln." This passion for the governance of their affairs was an on going concern not just a concern during the election cycles. This book could serve as a cautionary tale. The American public could do well to see past the "Roman Circus's" of sports , celebrity pap, unreal reality shows, egocentric pursuits of "me" and reevaluate some of the basic values so wisely enumerated in "The Age of Lincoln".

"The Age of Lincoln" is a very important book that would be a rewarding reading experience for anyone.

I just finished this book and really enjoyed it. In fact, I don't read history books all that often, but this book is very well written and easy to read. I expected to read about the differences between the North and the South, but I had never even thought about how the West fit into the picture. I expected to read about Civil War battles, but I liked the human interest side. I learned that Reconstruction formed an important part of America's history, and the sentiment of Reconstruction did not really end until the Supreme Court sanctioned segregation almost 30 years after the Civil War ended. Besides writing about the politics and culture of the times, the author put in interesting stories about different people. After finishing the book, I have great respect for Abraham Lincoln, and I found the idea that Lincoln was a Southerner both surprising and insightful. Lincoln is not the main character of the book, but his ideas had a huge impact on the coming of the Civil War, on the aftermath of war and how America developed. I recommend this book to anyone who an interest in history, scholars in academia, or those who are simply curious about the finest president of our country.

The Age of Lincoln is a persuasive and unique interpretation of the events and ideas that reshaped the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Focused around the life and ideas of Abraham Lincoln, there is also successful incorporation of a range of other influential characters such as John Brown, Preston Brooks, Andrew Johnson, Frank Baum, and William Jennings Bryan. The book discusses and advances central themes of race, religion, and liberty, and provides a convincing and fresh interpretation of the circumstances around the American Civil War.

The author does a good job of illustrating the contrast and tension of the age. He uses interesting examples to explore central contrasts of white vs. black, slave vs. free, south vs. north, rich vs. poor and uses those contrasts as a lens to understand many of the motivations and events of the period. Interestingly, much of the discussion of Lincoln's commitment to liberty that motivated him to wage the American Civil War eerily contrasts to the ideas of liberty and freedom advanced by another Republican president to justify a quite different war.

Overall, the book does an excellent job of relating the tensions and interests of the people in the ante bellum period, the events and struggles during the war, the reconstructive efforts afterwards, and it concludes persuasively by connecting these events to the rise of populism and the ascension of the corporation during the beginning of the 20th century. The Age of Lincoln is a refreshing and engaging interpretation of important historical events that remain relevant to this day.

Sometimes well written history is more dramatic and impressing than well written fiction. The Age of Lincoln is a great examlpe of this. The book reads like a historical dramatization at times as Burton weaves personal accounts, letters and other documents from the main actors in the drama and other sources into the narrative of the antebellum, Civil War and postbellum events. It is a sobering account of the reality of war, which was romanticized by the opposing sides as they preapred for the inevitable struggle that would follow secession. Burton also brings to life the deep passions that possesed both sides, including the sincere belief that their side was favored by God. You are left with an understanding of how these 40 to 50 years in American history profundly affected multiple aspects of America's future, some issues which remain unresolved to this day. It's a must read if you want a deeper understading of Lincoln, southern and northern mindsets, the role of African Americans, states rights, immigration, southern and northern economies and the many other components that made up the complex historical landscape of this period of our nation's history.

The best historians are excellent story tellers, usually with a relatively detached style. Burton is both an eminent scholar and a master story teller, but with a style that is anything but detached. Rather he achieves balance by assuming in turn in his narrative the voices of the competing passions and ideals that drove Americans to take up arms against each other. The result is the 19th century as a gripping drama, where one can see tension building along multiple fault lines up to the rupture of the Civil War. On collision course with this rupture are the political ambitions and skills, and the deeply tragic sense of destiny, embodied in Abraham Lincoln. The Union holds,barely---as it would not have done with any lesser leader.

Burton's perspective is unabashedly populist and religious. This is not the only perspective with which to view the 19th Century, but it is one valid one that has lacked up to now a truly scholarly presentation, and as such this book fills a unique niche. From this perspective Burton sees the Civil War as a battle not just between competing ideals, nor just between the good of freedom vs. the evil of slavery, but also between the competing economic interests of northern industrialists and southern slaveowners, interests which lead to the Gilded Age in the north and Jim Crow in the south in the latter part of the century. The tragic Reconstruction period (the war to save the Union followed by the peace that deeply divided the Union) is portrayed as dramatically in this book as the War itself.

The book ends late in the 19th century, but the story continues. Today's culture wars, economic stresses, and the Red-Blue political divide clearly reflect the divisions that fractured the Union so traumatically a century and a half ago, much like geological faults covered with new dirt and growth, but still capable of moving the earth. Burton's book needs a sequel in his distinctive voice and from his perspective, that would carry us through the 20th century and into the 21st. The Civil War is long over, but we are still living in the post-war period.

Orville Vernon Burton brings scholarship, passion and his own biases to this unusual account of the United States through the end of the 19th Century and a bit beyond.

Burton tracks the impact of ther Thirteen, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution on personal freedom for whites, blacks and everyone else. It is a fascinating book for several reasons.

First, Burton is a fine and conscientious scholar of the era. His research is evident on every page. His description of the Democratic Party, its role in the attempt to perpetuate slavery and in the awful depradations visited upon blacks after they acheived freedom is fully told here is fully told here. Burton also tells the history of the unfettered capitalism of the era and the attendant political cronyism that attended its rise. Here, there is a whiff that Burton might be an anti-capitalist himself, but it is difficult to tell with certainty.

What Burton does describe here is the heroic story of common people reaching out for personal freedom, for the right to be free of any kind of oppression. And here, Burton himself is heroic. He tells this story in great, almost overwhelming detail. His treatment of the Reconstruction Period is especially well done and will sadden most readers with its detail and possibly sicken some as well. As the zeal of the North's purpose cooled after the war, the Democratic Party became the handmaiden, if not the instigator, of terrible deeds. This is the most detailed social history of the period I have ever read.

Burton brings to life the enormous, jarring forces of change as freed slaves attempted to join the political, economic and social fabric of the nation, while defeated Southerners worked to subjugate them once again, while immigrants arrived in droves to expand the labor force and push down wages. The nation was still expanding westward, seeing the Native Americans as a force to be conquered, if not worse. Capital was being exploited in the form of new industries, bringing people off the farm into the cities where they became dependent upon the capitalists - and not without anger and resentment at their exploitation.

Burton tries to describe all these currents converging, with the blacks being stripped of their civil rights in the South, not being welcomed in the North and the capitalists colluding with the politicians to oppress everyone.

To his credit, Burton does the job well, but not perfectly. The march toward the end of the book and the end of the 19th Century becomes a bit bedraggled as Burton tries to wrap things up neatly. He doesn't do it neatly, but it really doesn't destroy the high quality of his work.

Overall, a truly unique and important history, even if a somewhat slow read.

Jerry

The Age of Lincoln is one of the most compelling and finely nuanced cultural histories of period. A master story teller, Burton weaves poignant stories of individuals and events that open up the complexity and texture of the period. Burton wonderfully captures the tensions created by slavery and freedom, territorial expansion and sectional conflict, economic realities and spiritual needs. Through deft portraits of individuals and events, he brings to life for the reader the promise of democracy, freedom, emancipation and Reconstruction as well as the horrors of war, Klan violence, lynchings, unchecked capitalism, and segregation.

Burton has the ability to explain complex social, economic and cultural tensions in elegant yet fast-paced prose. Perhaps the best example of this is his chapter on Reconstruction. I have not read a better or more cogent account of the Reconstruction era in one chapter. Burton takes a very complex historical era and makes it very clear and understandable without diminishing the complexity. This is a much needed book for our age since it helps us to understand the knotty and convoluted development of the American character and culture, woven from elements of both North and South, spiritual and commercial ventures, labor and agrarian unrest, immigration and industrialization.

Don't be fooled. This is not a book about Lincoln, but about his times and culture. While there are countless books and biographies about Lincoln and more will deluge us with his coming bicentennial in 2009, a reader will be pleasantly rewarded by picking up Burton's Age of Lincoln since there is no more lively and entertaining book to help one understand the culture and context that brought us Lincoln and the legacy he left. In the end, it will bring a fresh light to the reader's understanding and appreciation of Lincoln.

The "Age of Lincoln," according to Burton, was born of the post-Jackson period that blended professions of white democracy with uncompromising faith in one's moral righteousness and ended with a continued (and decidedly more complicated) and irresolvable debate over the meaning of freedom, "democratic citizenship, and equality (p. 369)". Son of a southern yeoman, Abraham Lincoln carried forth the rugged ideals of his upbringing with its stalwart code of southern honor to the presidency along with his evolving ideas about race, religion, and the American experiment with democracy. Burton suggests that the Civil War began over the question of slavery; was fostered by an absolutist, millenialist mentality of both sections; transformed into a war of freedom; and created a modern nation in its stead. Amidst the carnage the war's effects altered nearly every facet of American life from economics and religion to politics, race, psychology, and family dynamics. Despite some 620,000 casualties, Burton asserts that the most profound changes came about far from the battlefields and stemmed from the new reality of "the growth of corporations and of big government under Lincoln's administration (p. 224)."

Tackling the Civil War period is complex particularly from the vast outpouring of scholarly attention bestowed on it. Clearly indebted to James McPherson's magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom and Eric Foner's Reconstruction, Burton's The Age of Lincoln similarly weaves a grandly eloquent tale of social and cultural history but boldly proclaims the era's "fulcrum" Lincoln himself. Concerned more with the political, economic, and religious dynamics at work arguably than his predecessor McPherson, Burton extends the meanings and debates over such issues across time and space to the spectacular rise and fall of Populism, the brutalities of the Jim Crow Era, the tumultuous Civil Rights Era, and in the twisted myth and memory of modern America. Whereas the work of McPherson and Foner perhaps fall flattest on the economical changes wrought by the Civil War period, Burton's timely work nicely rests between them to provide, if only abbreviated, a concise and highly accessible statement on the effects of Charles Sellers' "market revolution" or, if one prefers, Daniel Walker Howe's recent "communications revolutions."

Although there is much to praise in Burton's fine work, The Age of Lincoln does harbor some serious problems. For example, the author's almost blatant disregard for warfare itself reduces, in nearly every instance, key battles to "pointless" or even "absurd." Slighting the very real "gains" made in territorial or even psychological advantage (despite appalling casualties) for the forces of a supply and demand market utterly divorces the central focus of the Lincoln Administration from the Age of Lincoln itself; the two, as it were, similarly do not stand divided against themselves either. In addition to Burton's preoccupation with the non-militaristic, he likewise at once makes too much of Lincoln's "southern yeomen" heritage and the ever-slippery code of "southern honor." Obviously indebted to Bertram Wyatt-Brown's now rather dated studies, in Burton's telling Lincoln's supposedly steadfast southern honor appears as if not quite deus ex machina, then something nearly so and in all but name. Rethinking Lincoln's rather complicated (and as Burton admits), "evolving" religious views, to cite one example, might force a twisted logic from a firm southern yeomen bent on honor to the highly-sectionalized New England Transcendentalist camp from which Lincoln was clearly, and arguably more so, indebted.

Dr. Burton succeeds in bring the reader back into the feel of the mid 19th century America. He calls the period roughly 20 years either side of Lincoln's inauguration "The Age of Lincoln". This is not a Lincoln book. Its about the transformation of the United States. The major themes are well documented by both the author and other review's here.

What is stunning is how accessible the book is to the non-historian. This is not a thesis work but a portrait of Americans. Woven around the framework of obvious historical events are individual stories and social trends. Specific stories, well researched and cited. All told in great narrative. I read alot of nonfiction and the occasional fiction , I can't label what the style is but its a bit like a Ken Burns documentary. You see the pictures. You hear the music. As you read. Its an easy to read book...something we readers can appreciate. Yet Burton is on solid factual ground. He brings so many facts and stories to light that I'm sure the work adds to the period's research. Even the book's cover adds to the overall work- a striking bloody red, white and blue across a typically American rural setting at sunset. Its a carefully chosen artwork circa 1861 entitled "Our Banner in the Sky" oil work by the American painter Church. Look at it here.

The reader is immersed in a difficult, painful yet singularly American period. The authors keeps the readers attention with a subtle yet brilliant literary style. Just read the first page.

A five-star work and one of the better books you'll ever read.

This book is a highly illuminating, sweeping look at the thinking, mindsets, and attitudes in the era beginning a couple of decades before Lincoln's presidency and continuing to the end of the century. Events of the period, in particular those related to the Civil War, are not ignored, but are seen as being fueled by prevailing thought and, in turn, exerting influence on mindsets and actions. According to the author, it was an era infused with a largely religion-based "millennial impulse for perfection." The religious revivalism that spread across the nation in the 1830s and 40s cast individuals as "moral free agents" with the responsibility to free themselves from such evil influences as drink and interest in other pleasures. But such choices were not simply left up to individuals; social institutions such as "workhouses, penitentiaries, lunatic asylums, and public schools" were created for the purpose of "disciplining bodies and controlling conduct in hopes that the light of reason" would replace base passions. In other words, a man subject to bondage, obsessions, or addictions was not and could not be free.

The institution of slavery came to be seen as an almost fatal obstruction to America achieving its God-ordained millennial destiny. Just the possibility of the expansion of slavery under "manifest destiny," despite the importance of cotton production to the US economy, added fuel to the fires of purification. In reaction, southerners countered with a distorted form of perfectionism. To them, the institution of slavery was part of a good, more perfect society: slaves were paternalistically cared for and non-slave-owning southern yeomen could pursue lives of democratic independence, free from laboring for others, not like the situation of northern factory operatives. Of course, the exercise of Constitutional freedoms, such as speaking out against the nefarious institution, was highly constrained, enforced through violence. As the author shows, southerners developed an exaggerated sense of "honor," even arrogance, regarding their society, which was defended at the slightest provocation. In addition, they had a grandiose, romantic notion of military action: dashing, well-dressed gentlemen self-righteously and decisively vanquishing the detestable enemy. Needless to say, the immense, horrific carnage of the Civil War discredited all such notions of righteous warfare conducted by "honorable" elites.

In addition to manifest destiny, the author points to any number of occurrences in the 1850s that, taken together, virtually guaranteed that anti-slavery, anti-southern political forces would arise to counter what was increasingly seen as an all-powerful southern Slave Power: the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that mandated citizen help in tracking down escaped slaves; the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; the Kansas-Nebraska Act that essentially voided the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by permitting popular vote to determine slavery in territories; the Ostend Manifesto which gave justification to the pursuit of Cuba by slaveholders; the violent attack on Sen. Charles Sumner while seated at his desk in the Senate; the "Dred Scott" decision that virtually declared unconstitutional any limits on the extent of slavery; and the hanging of the to be martyred John Brown. Southerners correctly perceived that Lincoln's election was a result of political factions that combined expressly to force limitations on southern influence in the federal government. The author suggests that the South viewed his election as tantamount to being a declaration of war. Lincoln's oft-stated view that freedom existed within a context of strict adherence to the legal order, including the preservation of slavery, was not persuasive. His lawful right to appoint "Republican judges, marshals, customs collectors, post office clerks, and more," was met only with the fear of broader impacts in the South. Southern perfectionism, with its stilted views of property and freedom, had diverged so far from northern ideals that disunity was virtually inevitable.

Among other considerations, Lincoln's religious sensitivities and awareness of American millennial aspirations compelled him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan 1, 1863. An unfortunate, though not unexpected, consequence was a stiffening of southern resolve, probably lengthening the War. As the author notes, the manner of warfare in that era, that is, the hurling of wave after wave of troops against entrenched positions, resulted in thousands of deaths each major engagement. Had the South capitulated after losing the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the first week of July, 1863, the deadly Richmond campaign, among others, would have been avoided sparing perhaps over one hundred thousand lives. In addition, seeing their entire way of life being destroyed, southerners showed little hesitation in exacting revenge through the murder of Union sympathizers in their midst, killing black prisoners of war, shooting deserters regardless of mitigating circumstances, executing surrendering Union soldiers, and burning locales deemed insufficiently loyal. Those deadly acts were really a part of the class fissures that appeared rather quickly once the War started. The talk of shared sacrifice became conscription, suffering, and deprivation for southern yeoman and special considerations and exemptions for planters. As the author notes, "contradictions within and among southerners doomed the Confederacy to collapse, and Divine Providence did not intervene on [their] behalf."

It is not possible to truly appreciate the magnitude of the difficulties and complexities of reincorporating the South into the US after Appomattox. Putting aside having to deal with the widespread death and destruction of the region, incredible changes in the social and political orders had to be made. The author discounts claims that Lincoln had no restoration plans, but without a doubt he underestimated what it would take. His policies of leniency and amnesty, continued by Pres. Johnson, failed to account for the rigid mindsets of the times, especially in the South. Southern white elites sought by any means possible, whether through legal Black Codes or through vigilantism, to restore total control of blacks - that is, slavery in all but name - but without previous paternalistic obligations. The Congressional Radical Republicans, after the immense sacrifices made in the War, rejected any such return to the old order. Their legislative agenda included the Freedmen's Bureau of 1865, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 establishing military districts and oversight, and the requirement that southern states recognize civil and political rights for blacks before readmission.

It seemed that these Congressional actions had ensured that "the Constitution now defined a new birth of freedom - citizenship and the right to vote." Of course, the Republican reconstruction program was subject to the vagaries of administration and the continued resistance of white southerners, but blacks gained considerably, winning local and state elections, forming coalitions with whites, gaining access to politically appointed jobs, and sending fourteen individuals to Congress. Unfortunately, that advancement and reconciliation could not be tolerated by a significant minority of southerners. In one of the most sordid chapters in US history, those southerners, led by the example of the Ku Klux Klan, began a systematic campaign of terror and murder, killing literally thousands, to thwart black political participation. The deterioration of blacks' place in southern society continued with the formal end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the subsequent ushering in of a legal regime of segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement across the South over the next few decades. Done with the tacit approval of the Republicans, it was a turn away from Lincoln's ideals of a government "of, by, and for" the people, and a turn towards electoral politics and the growing influence of big business. Their abandonment was withstood only through the support of the religious and educational infrastructure that the black community had formed in its first years of freedom.

The Civil War also transformed the North. Added to the list of southern delusions was the strange belief that the North would quickly collapse due to the disruption of the flow of southern cotton. In actuality, a vastly more powerful federal government granted extensive rights to corporations which became the hugely successful key elements of a new commercial order built on the wartime program of "railroad construction, homestead laws, land-grant colleges, and national banks." The prosperity and growth in the North was not even remotely matched in the South. The author notes that large businesses did stabilize the economy, yet that enhanced order and "freedom" for the well-to-do was not without contradictions with the millennial Republican views of free labor. Work regimes in large corporations consisting of worker control and diminished wages challenged the entire notion of the independent laboring man and Lincoln's ideas that labor comes before capital. Worker organizations such as the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor that emphasized "producerism" made little headway against employers who turned to the state repeatedly to suppress challenges to their control.

In addition, farmers of the South and West formed alliances to counter the disproportionate power of corporations to affect their lives, advocating both government regulation and the ownership of some utilities. Their successor, the Populist Party, fused with the Democrats in 1896 but were derailed by their free-silver panacea, not to mention the destabilizing effects of race. Those farmer and worker organizations had to contend with basic American beliefs in individualistic self-help and the ascendance of laissez-faire economics, reinforced by numerous Supreme Court decisions that rejected governmental intervention. White laboring men and farmers were shoved aside in a manner reminiscent of the withdrawal of support for freedmen in the mid-1870s. The author suggests that the "end of the Populists signaled the end of a yeoman class who sought to extend the personal, virtuous face-to-face social relations they grew up with as rural, evangelical Protestants. With the party's demise went the hope of restructuring the American economic system along more egalitarian lines."

Millennial thinking had largely disappeared by the end of the century. The terrible devastation and huge costs of the Civil War and its aftermath discredited idealism and ideology, whether consistent with or a distortion of long-held American ideals. There was a turn to science, technology, and administration under the control of educated experts, little influenced by religion. The pursuit of materialism, consumerism, and leisure became the province of the working class. Control of the workplace was ceded to employers; no longer was it a place for self-improvement. Labor organizations in the future confined demands to wages and benefits to enhance life outside the workplace.

This examination of the age of Lincoln based on the rise and fall of millennialism is quite interesting, though millennialism is not without its vagueness. Other paradigms can be emphasized, such as the power of class. Nonetheless, the book is a very ambitious, insightful look at the last sixty years of the 19th century. The social, cultural, economic, and political changes in this timeframe were so profound that they are virtually impossible to truly capture, but this book is right at the top in its attempt.

It is interesting that a huge fault line was a part of our founding, namely, the legal acceptance of slavery. Despite the huge outbreak of mid-19th century reformism, it took nearly two hundred years to more or less erase that fundamental social, political, and legal blunder from the national landscape. But the United States in the post-Civil War era began to be dominated by corporations and the wealthy, which became a part of the legal order. That development is an economic and social fault line that has had huge, if not devastating, repercussions in our society - though different, at least as important as legal slavery. The clock is now ticking at one hundred and fifty years on that situation. There have been abortive attempts to contend with corporate capitalism as did the Radical Republicans with slavery. One wonders if there is enough idealistic spirit left in the American people to finally deal with an economic system that is slowing eating away at the nation.