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My determination to read history books as my form of commemorating year 250 for America slowed down more than I would like after spring. That said I just added the last two books to my updated reading list.
The book Father Abraham by Striner was a wonderful reintroduction to Lincoln the dragon slayer and slavery crusher. Its author has been faulted for reading too much anti-slavery motivation into Lincoln but I ate that premise up. What Stiner fights is the contention by a raft of historians that Lincoln’s biggest issue was keeping the Union together and setting the ending of slavery to the side. I think Striner is right that Lincoln was more than simply a shrewed abolitionist in hiding. One of the ideas Lincoln flirted with was that a nation of only slave owning states which is what leaders of the South were attempting to create was not worth preserving by abandoning the founding fathers call for equality.
He came close to saying that and when he explicitly said some blacks should be given the vote after Appomatax that suggestion led John Wilkes Booth to say that was the last speech Lincoln would ever give.
But Striner leaves you with the impression that while Lincoln was not an abolutionist he was their kissing cousin. But Lincoln infuriated many abolitionists because he clearly ran for the presidency to limit slavery’s spread not to end it in the South. And yet as Striner details meticulously step by step, like a python killing its prey, Lincoln kept tightening the noose on the slave owners of the rebelling states as only a supremely crafty politician could.
But Lincoln was less rushed and more distant in the last book I read An Inconvenient Widow by Lois Romano. He was the odd but talented husband of Mary Todd Lincoln who vowed as a child to be married to a president of the United States. They were so different their friends couldn’t imagine them as husband and wife. I learned a few things about Abe in this book. He was regarded as brilliant by the politicans he knew in the state legislature because he was the key to passing the law that made dumpy Springfield, Illinois the state’s capitol. That would have been a remarkable achievement much like becoming president was twenty years later.
I also got a less cluttered look at the decade of the 1850’s where Lincoln had to step back as his Whig party disintegrated and he turned for several years to a law practice as southern slave society overreached with popular soverignty and Dred Scott and Bleeding Kansas.
