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  • Lincoln and Reconstruction by John C. Rodrigue
  • Keith Hebert
Lincoln and Reconstruction. John C. Rodrigue. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8093-3253-3, 176 pp., cloth, $19.95.

John C. Rodrigue’s Lincoln and Reconstruction argues that while “scholars have tended to downplay Lincoln’s role in inaugurating [Reconstruction,] . . . his thinking on reconstruction underwent a profound, even fundamental, transformation” throughout the war (1–3). Rodrigue takes the reader on a journey through Lincoln’s presidency, highlighting critical moments that led the president to rethink how a war fought to restore the Union might actually be used to reconstruct a “new nation . . . dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln and Reconstruction casts Lincoln as a leader willing to rethink his positions on matters of emancipation and racial equality but uncertain about how to adequately transform the postbellum South socially and economically. If Lincoln, as W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, was “big enough to be inconsistent,” Rodrigue’s concise account helps us better understand how those inconsistencies reflected the president’s political and intellectual evolution.

Lincoln and Reconstruction moves along at a quick pace that revolves around the president’s restorationist and reconstructionist attitudes. Sometimes these two views stood in sharp contrast to each other, while during other moments the two fused in Lincoln’s mind to form his vision for a postwar America. Rodrigue begins with a succinct look at Lincoln’s attitudes from his First Inaugural Address through the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. As other historians have done, Rodrigue describes Lincoln as a leader whose wartime views on reconstruction started with a desire to restore Federal authority over the Confederate States of America. When the Confederates did not rejoin the Union and the war seemed destined to even greater bloodshed, Lincoln pushed forward greater ambitions by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863—a document that gave the rebels a choice of either rejoining the Union immediately or risk “seeing their slaves declared ‘forever free’” (15). Rodrigue takes issue with historians who have depicted Lincoln’s desire to restore the Union as his principal vision for reconstruction. As early as 1862, Lincoln believed that reconstruction would require more than Confederate defeat and the readmission of the seceded states; it would also need “the broader transformation of the South’s social and economic relations” (42).

While Lincoln increasingly saw restoration and emancipation as war objectives, he struggled to identify what future freed slaves would have in American society. Meanwhile, the Emancipation Proclamation created additional political and military problems for Lincoln as northern Democrats sought out a negotiated end to the conflict that would allow Confederates to rejoin the Union but preserve slavery. Resistance to emancipation forced Lincoln to defend his evolving [End Page 192] war objectives. Despite mounting war weariness among a restless northern populace, Lincoln defended emancipation and began “thinking seriously about incorporating black people into American society, if not necessarily as full citizens” (61). Military victories in the fall of 1864 ensured Lincoln’s reelection and provided the president with a stronger hand in dealing with his adversaries, both Union and Confederate. Union victories also helped Lincoln push the Thirteenth Amendment, which had been passed by the Senate in the spring of 1864, through the House of Representatives in January 1865. As the war continued into 1865 and the Confederacy spiraled toward an inevitable defeat, Lincoln’s views on reconstruction became increasingly punitive. Shortly after the Confederacy’s surrender, Lincoln took the bold step of publicly supporting black suffrage, an unpopular position among northern voters, yet his vision for reconstruction ultimately remained conservative because it failed to call for any significant realignment of the South’s prevailing social and economic order. Lincoln failed to realize, as Rodrigue points out, “that the restorationist and reconstructionist dimensions of his thinking were ultimately incompatible” (140).

Like other works included in the Southern Illinois University Press’s Concise Lincoln Library series, Lincoln and Reconstruction provides historians with an in-depth look at the president’s evolving views. The book’s strength rests in its focused narrative. By centering on Lincoln and Reconstruction, Rodrigue strips away all of the varied events of...

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