Before I begin I should say that I have met Professor Burton, it was 25 years ago and while I did not study with him, he was a very impressive figure when he addressed my class on historiography.
This probably is one of the best works on the Civil War in many years. "The Age of Lincoln" is the product of someone who has read, mastered and integrated the primary source material to produce a work of outstanding scholarship.
The basis thesis of this book is that Lincoln's new birth of freedom, called for in the Gettysburg Address still remains a goal and not yet a reality. The Civil War still dictates policy (the election returns of 2008 are an obvious case in point). The problem that remains still is integrating the former slave states into the United States, both culturally and socially.
Burton presents a number of arguments that are quite compelling. Slavery was a useful institution in the south not only to harvest the cotton and other agricultural crops, but also to bind the slaveholders together with the non-slave-holders. Viewing slaves as a permanent underclass is arguably the reason that so many people that did not own slaves were willing to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Lose of a permanent underclass meant that there was no limit to how far one could decline the world. This is not an old argument; it has been made often enough-in history and fiction, see "To Kill A Mockingbird" for probably the most famous example of this mentality. However what Burton brings to the argument is the facts, the literature and the documentation to demonstrate how this sentiment evolved.
This is more of an intellectual history of the dominant strains of thought during the Civil War and the origins are, as Burton correctly ascribes them, based on the mid-19th century millennialism that gripped the country, beginning around the 1840s. This lead to a series of schools of thought and religions , spurred on by Christianity.
Of course what became the dominant school to emerge from this intellectual phenomenon was anti-slavery. However, abolition never became a really popular movement even after the Civil War, civil rights for slaves and former slaves was a rather unpopular notion. This is however what informed Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which generations of school children memorized without really understanding it.
The south may have gone to war to protect slavery, the Union went to war to safeguard the political system bequeathed to the United States by the Founding Fathers. Whenever Lincoln attempted to further emancipation (which served a variety of goals, most significantly to keep Europe out of the Civil War), there were difficulties.
After the Civil War emancipation and the rights of citizens under the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments was accomplished only with a rump congress without any confederate members seated and military rule. Then as now, liberty was regarded with a certain degree of suspicion.
Tragically, many of the aims sought by the Radical Republicans never were initiated. The fate of the ex-slaves was endlessly debated and in the end the government did little to ensure the rights that they were guaranteed under the constitution. The problem was not integrating the freedmen into the political life of the country, but their formers owners and their followers. This problem was one which Ulysses S. Grant was unwilling to address and few politicians were willing to expend capital on until nearly 100 years after the Civil War.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are probably the two most distinguished and influential statesmen of American political thought. They are also the most troublesome, but in a good way. America is still having difficulties trying to understand the implications of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" is even more problematic. It is a great achievement that a scholar such as Professor Burton can show us how all of this came to be.
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