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  • Editor’s Note

During his speech for the unveiling of the Emancipation monument in Lincoln Park in 1876, Frederick Douglass observed that anyone can say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln but no one can say anything new about him. That assessment, however, has done nothing to halt the flow of books, articles, and movies about one of the most beguiling figures in U.S. history. Among other facets of his character, scholars and popular media have featured Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the dictator, the redeemer, the lawyer, the politician, and even the vampire-slayer. Few aspects of his life remain unexamined, including speculation about whether he had Marfan syndrome, a genetic defect that causes overgrowth of the body’s long bones. Despite this outpouring of works that seem to have covered every possible inch of a human being, we remain drawn to probing every possible dimension of a person instrumental in changing the face of the nation.

In this issue, the authors of our research articles offer new insights into the world in which the sixteenth president lived and the policies he sanctioned for saving the Union. Leading off is a thoughtful exploration of Lincoln’s knowledge of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whether the future president experienced the lectures of the transcendentalist on his tour of Springfield in the 1850s is debatable. But Stephen Cushman ponders how the intellectual worlds of the two men intersected as they may have shared a particular understanding of “fate” and “self-reliance.” Next, Christopher Phillips reconsiders the policies Union forces applied to civilians, especially in the western Border States. He shows that a hard war, one allowed by Lincoln, came much earlier for citizens in the Border States than in the Confederacy. Rounding out the research articles is a piece by Jonathan White that explores why the Supreme Court provided so little of a force during the Civil War. It turns out that the Lincoln administration contributed to the court’s ineffectual posture by working hard to reduce the litigation that might result in cases that could undermine the war effort. So to our list of Lincolns we might add the cultural assimilator, the early hard warrior, and the astute lawyer/president.

This issue includes two other treats. In our review essay, Yael A. Sternhell identifies a new strand of what she calls “neo-revisionism” that has infiltrated at least a part of the literature of the American Civil War. By this, she means a view of the war that is much more critical, that brings out the atrocities and hardships, and that adds a new dimension to African [End Page 161] American involvement. But despite its challenge to a celebration of the Civil War, this neo-revisionist trend has not yet created an overarching narrative. Closing this issue is a provocative piece by Gary W. Gallagher, whose book The Union War won the Tom Watson Brown Prize of the Society of Civil War Historians for the best book of 2011. He suggests that historians have gone too far in privileging emancipation rather than Union as a goal for most northerners.

As always, we hope that the good work of great scholars provides food for thought. [End Page 162]

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