No Unconditional Surrender: The Historian as the Public and Private Man, Don E. Fehrenbacher

No Unconditional Surrender: the Historian as the Public and Private Man, Don E. Fehrenbacher Gabor Boritt [Editor's Note: Late in 1997, the Civil War era and the historical profession in general lost one of its best with the death of Don E. Fehrenbacher. We asked noted Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt, who directs the Civil War Institute and serves as the Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College, to provide this tribute based on the obituary that he furnished to the AHA Perpsectives.] J We know his public life well. He was one of the most important historians of the Civil War era during the past generation and more, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the Lincoln Prize. For most of his life he served as a professor at Stanford University. We know that he saw the era as an extraordinarily important time during which "not only the survival but the constitutional form and moral character of the nation was at stake."2 His scholarship reflects that he had been hooked on Abraham Lincoln for life. His first book, Chicago Giant ( 1957), a biography of the Illinois politician John Wentworth, won the award of the Association for State and Local History. His second book, Preparationfor Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's (1962), established him as one of the leading figures of a century and more of Lincoln scholarship. This careful analysis of the political milieu of Lincoln's rise was followed by four other substantial contributions, including two collections of Lincoln's speeches and writings: Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait (1964; translated into Spanish and Pak-Bengali), and Lincoln (2 voumes, 1989) 1 For theobituary see AHA Prespectives (March 1998): 33-34. Dr. Boritt's recent books, edited and/or coauthored, from Oxford University Press, include The Gettysburg Nobody Knows (1997, paper 1998) and Lincoln at the Millenium: The New Gettysburg Lectures (forthcoming). 2 Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the ¡850s (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1962). Civil War History, Vol. xlvi No. 2 © 2000 by The Kent State University Press DON E. FEHRENBACHER149 for The Library of America; also the Recollected Words ofAbraham Lincoln (1996), a treasure trove of carefully evaluated recollected comments, compiled and edited with Virginia Fehrenbacher; and studies chiefly of sources, Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (1987). All this came from a man whose Prelude to Greatness apologized for that book, "hoping that the results might at least palliate the sin of adding still another volume to the enormous mass of Lincoln literature."3 As so many others touched by Lincoln, he just could not help himself. Don also performed a great service in helping us understand the origins of the Civil War. In 1976 he completed The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, left unfinished by the death of his Stanford colleague, David Potter. Harvard's William E. Gienapp described the volume as "the best analysis of the period."4 Most evaluators agreed, and the book received the Pulitzer Prize. Fehrenbacher further edited, or co-edited, three other Potter volumes. Additionally, in The South and Three Sectional Crises (1980), delivered as the Walter L. Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, he looked at three major crises in the Congress of ante-bellum. Probably Fehrenbacher's major work is The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978). The book focused on the crucial slavery case decided by the Supreme Court in 1857, and it, too, won the Pulitzer Prize. After generations of study, at last a scholar had carefully deciphered not only the highly complicated origins of the case, but also the equally difficult to understand opinions expressed by the members of the Court. The study placed into context the large role played by the Dred Scott case in the coming of the Civil War. Columbia University's Barbara Fields summed up matters eloquently about Don Fehrenbacher: "All of his books display an uncanny flair for communicating the most abstruse and technical points of law or historical evidence in prose that reads as though sculpted by a master's hand."5 Should anyone doubt Field's careful judgment about how Don wrote, and not have the time to read...