Lincoln in the Atlantic World by Louise L. Stevenson (review)

Louise L. Stevenson’s Lincoln in the Atlantic World throws the eminent American leader into the broader context of the nineteenth-century world, highlighting the role that events in Africa, Europe, and to a lesser extent Asia played in Abraham Lincoln’s life. Relying on newspapers, Roy P. Basler’s volumes, and a set of books Lincoln either explicitly or tacitly acknowledged as significant, Stevenson delivers a monograph that illustrates both the impact that world events had on Lincoln and the prominent role he believed the republican government of the United States held within a nineteenth-century world of upheaval, revolution, and reform. Both Lincoln historians and scholars of nineteenth-century world history will appreciate Stevenson’s urgent plea that we not glide by Lincoln’s sweeping statements pointing to the Union as “the last best, hope of earth,” but rather appreciate the solemnity with which the sixteenth president approached America’s role in the world (2).

There is much to like about this work. Just as historians of the antebellum United States have long known that the Revolutions of 1848 reverberated across the Atlantic to reach American shores, historians of nineteenth-century world history and Atlantic world history will find that the chapter on Lincoln’s death provides insight into the impact that the American Civil War and the leadership of the wartime president had on peoples and governments around the world. Whereas Martha Hodes’s Mourning Lincoln (2015) examines reactions in the United States to Lincoln’s death, Stevenson steps outside of the national sphere to discover that not only Americans but peoples across the world mourned the loss of the American leader. Lincoln scholars, meanwhile, will enjoy the international context within which Stevenson places the term “the Tycoon,” which—as Michael Burlingame and others have shown—was the nickname that Lincoln’s secretaries endearingly used to refer to him throughout his presidency. Ultimately, this work offers more than its title suggests. While the Atlantic world, specifically, accounts for a good number of the international occurrences discussed in the book, the content Stevenson draws upon actually reaches farther across the globe, including Japan and Hungary.

The only thing that may detract from Stevenson’s achievement is a lack of cohesion. The book functions more as a collection of essays than a single monograph. While each chapter provides useful and valuable information about one aspect of Lincoln’s relationship with the Atlantic world, the topics appear out of chronological order, moving the reader from Lincoln’s death in chapter 1 to his campaign in chapter 2 and infamous night passage through Baltimore on the way to the presidency in chapter 3, before jumping backward in time to the German lessons Lincoln learned in Illinois before his presidency. The final chapter comes back around to Lincoln’s fatal theater visit in order to illuminate the international underpinnings of the play Our American Cousin. The structure is likely a direct outcome of Stevenson’s choice to offer rich context and narrative detail that in a more chronologically driven work would most likely fall by the wayside. Nevertheless, Stevenson’s work does not offer an extensive reinterpretation of Lincoln’s ideology as changing over time based on his exposure to particular global events or trends. Instead, each chapter throws one episode from the Illinoisan’s life, or one aspect of his thought, into a greater context, forcing us to consider the ways in which Lincoln’s knowledge of world events impacted his thoughts on slavery and emancipation, his stance on immigration, and his belief in republicanism.

This achievement is significant. In the wake of new global and Atlantic world studies that place the United States within a larger context, historians are just beginning to develop a more cosmopolitan portrait of the sixteenth president of the United States. As Kevin Peraino has recently noted in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American...