The Age of Lincoln
A History
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations.
America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country.
Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson appeared in 1945 and has been an enduringly popular work with general readers. Burton, an associate professor of history and sociology (In My Father's House Are Many Mansions), has written an ambitious sequel, or perhaps homage, on the age of Lincoln. Burton's intriguing thesis is that Lincoln's most profound achievement was not the abolition of slavery but the enshrinement of the principle of personal liberty protected by a body of law. Thus he elevated the founding fathers' (and Jackson's) more restricted vision to a universal one. The outbreak and course of the Civil War should be seen in the light of competing notions of what "freedom" meant, rather than (as has usually been the case) as a bloody conflict over black emancipation or states' rights. Lincoln, as Burton convincingly argues, both created his age and was a product of it: he matured in an America struggling with a rising free market and millennial impulses that sought Christian perfection. The ultimate result was the triumph of democratic capitalism. For readers seeking to comprehend the sweeping social, religious and cultural backdrop to the Civil War, Burton's book is a worthy heir to Schlesinger's. 8 pages of b&w illus.
