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362CIVIL WAR HISTORY ure of his age and any person interested in that age would sooner or later want "to have his say" about him. Lincoln was the greatest figure in the American experiment, and Trueblood, as a student of that experiment , wants to have his say about Lincoln. As an answer to the second question, Trueblood emphasizes that he is not writing primarily about Lincoln's religion but about his "religious thinking." The key to Lincoln's greatness, the author states, was "his spiritual depth." This spiritual quality is seen most clearly in the Second Inaugural , which in addition to being a great state paper is a "theological classic." Therefore, Lincoln was a great theologian as well as a great political leader. The process or steps by which Lincoln developed his theology, or his concept of the relation of man to God, is the theme of the book. In tracing the process, Trueblood describes Lincoln's early religious ideas, his increasing awareness of a Divine Will influencing the affairs of men, his spiritual growth in the anguish of the Civil War, and such assorted subjects as Lincoln and prayer and Lincoln and the Bible and Lincoln and church membership. Little in the book will be new to Lincoln students. As example, it is no longer necessary to demonstrate that Lincoln from his youth believed in some kind of Supreme Being or to demolish Herndon's insinuation that he was a non-believer. Trueblood recounts a familiar story but he tells it well and argues his case with good humor and good sense. And no previous writer has so ably related Lincoln's political acts to his religious thought. This new treatment of an old subject deserves the attention of students of the man and his era. T. Harry Williams Louisiana State University Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery. By John S. Wright. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1970. Pp. xiii, 215. $6.00.) It is the expressed desire of Professor Wright to "glean . . . some insights into the interaction of a moral issue and the political process" from the career of Abraham Lincoln. Drawing upon the internal politics of Illinois in the 1840's and 1850's, the author fails to accomplish his worthy and ambitious goal because of his limited perspective on the importance of the Illinois scene alone. He neglects to draw adequately upon Lincoln's own national perspective and the very important roots of the moral crusade against slavery found in the entire Reform movement . Thus, an opportunity is missed to view the importance of the moral aspect of the antislavery crusade in relation to the entire American society. The author is further limited by an interpretive bias which is heavily anchored in the revisionist school of the 1930's and 1940's. Serious consideration of the moral issue of slavery in this period before the Civil War is hampered by such repeated allegations as: "Lincoln was almost a monomaniac on the question of slavery in politics BOOK REVIEWS363 from 1854 forward" (p. 132); "Thus the rigidity, the all-or-nothing spirit and the easy acceptance of a conspiracy theory—typically associated with a moral issue—permeated all real sectional conflicts" (p. 36). To repeatedly charge monomania, which the author does, is to destroy the very careful, thoughtful claim Lincoln reiterated during the debates with Stephen A. Douglas that the moral issue of slavery, "the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrongthroughout the world," is "the real issue at stake." Again in 1860, Lincoln declared that "Slavery is that great political question of the nation ." Why is it necessarily monomania to oppose the great national evil, as one sees it? We have certainly come much further in our understanding of abolitionism than is here described. The author never clearly identifies these so-called "radicals" who are supposed to be so rigid, having an all-or-nothing quality, a tendency to monomania and a lack of interest in means. With no supporting development, "the radicals" are pictured as Lincoln's constituents who would be asked to give up the most in any compromise by 1861 and were "even less well informed and even more than Lincoln...

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