Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures (review)

BOOK REVIEWS339 freedpeople, it may have been fortunate as well. These common points outweigh the disagreements—over whether Sherman's failure to bag Hood's army represented a failure, the wisdom of the terms offered to Joseph Johnston, and Sherman's battlefield skills, to name but three. Hereafter studies of Sherman will have to contend with these two provocative works, and future biographers of Sherman will see their work measured against the new standard established by Marszalek. Brooks D. Simpson Arizona State University Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures. Edited by Gabor S. Boritt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xxix, 240. $23.00). Editing six lectures—part of the Robert M. Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture series at Gettysburg College—was clearly a labor of love for Gabor S. Boritt. Adding an essay of his own, not a part of the series, the editor addressed the problem ofunifying disparate material by focusing on specific aspects of Lincoln 's political career. Not all readers will share the editor's almost worshipful view of Lincoln, whom he describes as "the central figure of American history." Yet all the historians included are distinguished scholars, and their essays well worth preserving. The opening essay, "The Shadow of a Coming War" by Robert V. Bruce, briefly traces fears of American leaders concerning disunion and civil war from the 1780s to 1861. Bruce makes it abundantly clear that the possibility of disunion and civil war was very much a part of American political thought in the early period. Apparently, Lincoln refused to recognize the danger until South Carolina's action forced him to do so. As Bruce points out in his final paragraphs, the issue was permanently put to rest with the Union victory. James M. McPherson's "Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender " pictures the president as a war leader whose well-timed Emancipation Proclamation revealed him as a master of national as well as military strategy. Although Lincoln tried at first to entice the Confederate States back into the Union with minimum force, he came to accept a policy of unconditional surrender which included emancipating the slaves. According to McPherson, ridding the nation of slavery became as vital as saving the Union. Consequently, a Union victory not only brought the nation together, it also signaled a new birth of freedom. In his essay, "The Emancipation Movement," David Brion Davis examines the concept of emancipation as it evolved from the manumission of individual slaves, with little regard for their future condition. It was assumed that freed slaves would continue to be the same submissive labor force they had comprised under bondage. Even though the Proclamation was seriously flawed, it placed Lincoln in the role of the Great Emancipator and provided an inspiration for later civil rights activists. 340CIVIL WAR HISTORY "One Among Many: The United States and National Unification" is the title of Carl Degler's essay in which he finds parallels in the Civil War with various wars of national unification in Europe and with the national movement in Canada. Giving special attention to Switzerland and Germany, he sees similarities between the blood and iron policy of Bismarck and the war policy of Lincoln. Except for Canada, all the other nineteenth-century nations were united by violence. Degler echoes the theme that William B. Hesseltine sounded years ago in his book Lincoln and the War Governors. Hesseltine contended that the Civil War was in reality a war against the states, both North and South, and was truly a war of national unification. The unification theme is treated from a different perspective in Kenneth Stampp's "One Alone? The United States and National Self-determination." Prior to his presidency, Lincoln, along with many other American political leaders, had espoused the cause of self-determination but reversed his thinking when the concept was applied to the South's bid for independence. Before the war's end, however, Lincoln had added the moral cause of emancipation to the North's objectives, thus giving justification to crushing the rebellion beyond the need to keep the Union intact. In "War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt ," Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., justifies the unconstitutional policies...